The ViaBTC mining pool mined Block 840,000, resulting in a decrease of the miners’ reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. The mining pool, however, reaped substantial profits from commissions; at the present exchange rate, ViaBTC will receive 40.7 BTC (approximately $2.6 million) for every block.
The record commission is linked to user actions in Casey Rodmarmor’s Runes Protocol, which was developed by the same people who made Bitcoin Ordinals. In the early days of the project, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts created their “NFTs” at the very beginning, and this protocol was launched at the same time as the halving.
In many ways, Runes Protocol has replaced BRC-20 tokens. Runes use the UTXO model to “seal” tokens, in contrast to Bitcoin Ordinals, which have tokens “written” into Bitcoin blocks.
It should be noted that the volume of commissions was significantly higher than usual in subsequent blocks. The first five blocks had a total of $3.82 million.
In times of financial instability, Bitcoin has emerged as the most popular instrument, according to experts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).