The expectations of Bitcoin miners are placed on the Ordinals and Runes protocols. Both are methods of minting fungible tokens and NFTs that are recorded in the Bitcoin archive.
Since the halving occurred, the Runes protocol was launched and its market is experiencing great activity, with high demand resulting in high percentages of total transactions on the mainnet. However, this activity has not had a consistently large impact on miners' profits so far, contrary to what many expected.
The reduction in the reward of the network's miners after the halving has an impact on the unrealized profits of the miners, since from that event they obtain half of the BTC that they obtained before, without counting the profits from commission and other financial activities. Specifically, the value in US dollars of the reward went from USD 400,000 to USD 200,000 for each block mined (at a rate of USD 64,000 for each BTC). Currently, Bitcoin rewards 3,125 BTC per mined block.
According to data from the mining software development company Braiins, miners' profits have remained at an average of $33 million per day since April 25.
The figure contrasts with the profits that miners obtained during the first two days after the halving. Miners' unrealized profits amounted to more than $100 million on April 20. The cause of this increase was the launch of Runes, a protocol that allows tokens and NFTs to be registered in Bitcoin.
After the halving, network fees exceeded the $100 mark for several days to confirm a transaction in the first 30 minutes. In fact, commission averages of USD 200 were recorded during the first hours after the halving.
Before the halving occurred, the average daily profits of miners remained above USD 60 million. After Runes' initial boom, profits were cut in half. Various analysts predicted that Ordinals and Runes would have the ability to make up for this decline in profits, but so far it has not had that effect consistently.
It is worth mentioning that the decrease in the value of daily profits of Bitcoin miners will largely depend on the price of BTC and the value of network fees. Because bitcoin remains at a price of USD 63,000, similar to its value before the halving, the impact of this factor is zero for miners.
The Capriole Investment firm predicted that an increase in Bitcoin commissions, as a consequence of the activity of Ordinals and Runes, would bring economic benefits for the network's miners. According to the analysis, Runes' activity could prevent the capitulation of miners who become less profitable after the halving. That is to say, those companies that have older generation equipment, less efficient in the use of electrical energy, would cease to be profitable.
The facts indicate that despite increased activity in the Runes market in recent days, network fees remain at an average of $3 per high priority transaction (confirmed in the first 10 minutes). In fact, since April 26, more than 3 million transactions linked to 40,000 new Runes projects have been executed, without this activity having had any repercussions on network commissions.
