[upbeat music] Welcome back to Bitcoin Season Two, the weekly update metrics heavy edition.
May Day, Bitcoin is going down, ordinals are dead, runes are dead. We've been here before, but maybe they're actually dead this time. So without further ado, we're just gonna get into it.
Um, this is a visual heavy stream, so if you're listening to this, I'll try to describe what I'm seeing, all the red on the screen. And if you are just listening, maybe hop over to the YouTube or the X live stream.
So without further ado, um, CoinGecko, it's my favorite degen dashboard, but basically Bitcoin is now in the, uh, uh, sixty thousand dollar range.
We are teetering on the edge of going back into the 50K. Some said this wasn't possible.
Um, get ready because this is when all of your friends and family start texting you asking if you're okay because you were super into crypto, and you're afraid to tell them that actually you didn't own any Bitcoin, you only owned runes, which have fared even worse.
Um, so, [clears throat] uh, yeah, Bitcoin, maybe by the end of this stream could be into the fifties. Um, not looking good. Uh, as always, DCA and you t- you can just turn your brain off and don't look back.
Um, let's go into the Bitcoin update. Uh, Bitcoin stuff, fees are also pretty low. Still largely in the double digits, but barely hanging on. Um, this is nine, ten, eleven sats for vBite as estimated by mempool.space.
Um, we still... If we look at the kind of the amount of transactions sitting in the mempool waiting, we are grinding through, uh...
We still have a, a decent amount of, I would say, number of blocks, um, waiting to be included or w- uh, transactions waiting to be included into blocks, but, um, we are just seeing ac-activity on Bitcoin decline overall.
[clears throat] Um, let's get into ordinals. We're gonna keep- we're gonna go through this pretty quickly. This is data always as dashboard. Um, cumulative inscriptions, uh, also pretty down.
I say this every week, but, um, we saw a cu-cumulative num- the rate at which inscriptions are being inscribed drop off a cliff on April twentieth, which was the halving.
Still pretty low, only fifteen to thirty thousand inscriptions per day.
We saw a little bit of bump for BRC-20, um, uh, at the end of May with the Unisat pizza, five tick- five-digit ticker launch, but now we're back down.
We are only hitting, uh, maybe under thirty thousand inscriptions per day. Regardless, um, sixty-seven, sixty-eight million inscriptions, that's fine. Um, uh, not a lot of BRC-20 activity.
Uh, there's no sophons running anymore. Um, if you know, if you don't know what a sophon is, you know, go back and, you know, search that term on Twitter, S-O-P-H-O-N.
And the daily inscription fee spend, also really, really low. We're looking at, um, you know, under two hundred thousand, under a quarter million per day. Let's look at the, uh, marketplaces. This is Domo's dashboard.
Um, let's see. Trend, you know, volume by marketplace is down. Transaction, transactions by marketplace are down. Percentage...
I think the only really interesting thing happening right now in the marketplace space is going to be, um,
again, what I've, what I've identified before, which is that Magic Eden seems to be eating the other marketplaces in market share.
Right now, Magic Eden, just today, sixty-nine, for the memes, sixty-nine percent of all, uh, volume is taking place on Magic Eden as Magic Eden kind of subsumes both the, the JPEG market and the runes market.
So again, I think this is significant because Magic Eden is taking over basically a fungible token trading market, and that's not ever been their focus before.
Uh, fungible tokens do significantly more volume than, uh, non-fungible tokens, NFTs.
And I think, uh, this is one of the more ex-exciting kind of macro trends we're seeing, which is a phenomenon spurred on by the ordinals and runes focus from Magic Eden.
Unique users, uh, I think this date- this data might be out of date, or this dashboard might be wrong, but it does seem to be ticking up a little bit. Uh, we'll see.
Is this just people spreading out wallets for future airdrops? Who knows. Um, I also like to go to Alchemia's, uh, dashboard. Um, if we...
I'll just pull up this, uh, chart, transaction type by fee percentile of a Bitcoin block, where, um, this is a breakdown of like how, uh, of, of all of the fees in each block, um, what transactions do we attribute them to?
So, uh, right now, runes are about half of the fees in each Bitcoin block. Traditional transactions are about half of the fees, and a negligible amount would be related to ordinals and/or BRC-20.
So right now, the average Bitcoin block has about fifty/fifty, uh, normal financial transaction fees and, uh, runes fees.
And because runes are down, this just means everything across Bitcoin is downI didn't even get into, like, broader crypto. Like, Solana is going through a bit of a crisis right now.
It's being memetically attacked with the, uh, Milady shitposters and fudsters, and you got to enjoy watching it. Um, ETH is down, even though they just got an ETF. Um, everybody's down.
Um, and then the other dashboard I'll pull up, and I, I do like to cover this 'cause I don't think any other, like, Bitcoin-focused shows cover this, um, are the, uh,
are the, like, the lansgate of Bit- uh, landscape of Bitcoin L2s. I want to find a more comprehensive dashboard for this.
But this is the thesis, the Thesis dashboard, which just shows the three kind of, um, three of the most notable Bitcoin, quote, "L2s" and the state of their assets in TVL. So Bob is the first one.
Um, the majority of assets on Bob are gonna be wrapped Bitcoin, not majority.
Half of them are gonna be WBTC, and the majority, super majority are going to be, um, uh, Bitcoin-pegged assets like TBTC, um, or more WBTC or, or the sovereign, uh, equivalent. Three hundred million TVL on Bob.
Um, not a lot of new daily inflows to Bob since the, since late April. Um, let's go to Meso from Thesis, the creators of the da- this dashboard. A hundred thirty-one million on Meso.
Thir- twelve hundred, thirteen hundred BTC, again, is a wrapped BTC product. Um, actually, 2,000 BTC they... That's adding both wrapped BTC and Thesis' um, bridged BTC.
Again, not a lot of additional cumulative deposits into, uh, Meso over the past month. And then the last one is Merlin. [inhales] 1.4 billion dollars in TVL.
Most of that is, uh, again, a wrapped Bitcoin equivalent staked on their chain. Um,
outflows from Merlin have mostly plateaued, so they're staying around a bit of a flat 22,000, uh, Bitcoin equivalent. Let's go to Runes. Runes market cap also down. Guys, it's not looking very good.
Things are down bad. So Runes' total market cap around 1.28, 1.3 billion dollars. Again, for a new novel shitcoin fungible token protocol, 1.3 billion two months after launch. It's been 64 days.
Remember, 64 days. 1.3 billion dollars total market cap is still [chuckles] pretty respectable, but it's headed the wrong way, unfortunately. I wonder if there is a way we could make them go up.
That narrative coming soon. Um, as far as, uh, more data on Runes, um, Casey's HP is at, again, a hilarious 69%.
If you don't know what that is, Casey had a tweet which is like, if, um, Runes is not over a billion dollars by X date, then I will commit seppuku. Well, he's safe.
His HP is currently about sixty-nine according to this dashboard, 69% over his minimum. I think the total market cap might be slightly incorrectly calculated here. Um, I, I like to point out the daily exchange volume.
This gives us a more of a precise look on just the Runes volume for Magic Eden, OKX, and Unisat. But Unisat is now at under 10% of all marketplace volume across the Ordinals and Runes ecosystem.
This marketplace used to dominate, um, the ecosystem and hasn't really gotten much sustained traction since the five-ticker BRC twenty, uh, standard evolution.
Right now, it's Magic Eden with fifty-four percent of all volume, sometimes, like, sixty to seventy percent. Um, the only real direct competitor is OKX, which also does have Runes, but they don't have all Runes listed.
They've only got some of the majors, uh, like RSIC. Um, let me pull up the other... Let me pull up Magic Eden as well really quick, just to look at the state of the Runes tickers. Um,
right now, Runes tickers are down. BAMK of Nakamoto Dollar, the stable bit- Runes-backed stablecoin, is down thirty percent. Dog Go To Moon is actually holding pretty steadily. You've got to hand it to the Dog community.
They are defending this floor pretty strongly, and for, I would say, it's probably the most liquid of all of the Runes. They're managing for it not to be as liquid to the downside. RSIC and PUPS are down. Um,
uh, Billion Dollar Cat has retraced a bit. Again, it carried the market a lot last week. And then where is the next one? There's another cat out here. I think it's the silly cat one. I don't see it on this
chart, but whatever it is. The silly cat Rune, you know what I'm talking about. Right now, the, the, the meme narrative has, uh, I would say, moved on from Billy Cat to the Silly Cat. Uh,
that's all I really have to say about that. Um, I think another thing to, to, to, to pay attention to, and I haven't pulled this up before... Oh yeah, Stupid Silly Cat, that's the name of the Rune. It's t- six...
uh, up 67% over the last twenty-four hours. I think the other thing that I want to point out is, um,
I haven't run the numbers, but we have this, uh, product on, um, in the Runes and Ordinals ecosystem called Liquidium, which is basically allows you to borrow against your digital assets, either Runes or, uh, Ordinals inscriptions.
And, uh, I have just, my, my subjective observations have been that people have been getting liquidated left and right.
They loan their-NodeMonk or their OMB, and they can't repay it plus interest when the time is up, and, um, it gets, uh... It goes to the person that loaned them the Bitcoin against that.
So I think this is happening a lot. I have a dashboard here from Geniidata, um, but it doesn't really show, I think, like, cumulative liquidations, and that's something I would like to see.
Um, I would like to see, uh, if we're seeing the rate at which people are getting liquidated increase as the prices of these assets go down.
I was having a conversation about this with some other person this past week about, um, theoretically, you might want to be on the loaning side, because if you loan the BTC against these assets and then the, the person who borrows against it defaults it, you get the asset.
But if the asset is also going down, then technically [chuckles] you, uh, you may... It may not actually work out as well as you'd hoped. Um, so right now it seems a lot of these BTC DeFi products only really work,
uh, super well for all the participants when everything's going up. Um, we- it's like we didn't really learn a whole lot from last cycle where [chuckles] BTC Fi, DeFi,
decentralized finance as a whole really, uh, works in- when the market's going up, but when it's going down, things start to break. Um, I...
Anyway, but, uh, Liquidium has some really good engineers, and I like the folks over there. I just wanted to bring that topic up. So speaking of bringing topics up, yes, we're gonna get into it.
Um, I think the topic, it is a moving target. I think it's evolved even as I've, um, been talking here, the topic of programmable runes. So
if you were under a rock this past few days, and probably you may have should have just stayed under a rock the past few days. We had a bit of a micro-narrative in the runes.
Maybe we're starved for narratives, but this, uh, this catchphrase, programmable runes, was introduced, um, uh, I think originally from, uh, Isabelle Foxen Duke, um, kind of a notable comms person in the ecosystem,
uh, who was tweeting a bit about programmable runes being veiled a bit. Uh, uh, you know, you know, you tweet something, and it gets a lot of interaction. Maybe you tweet another thing on it.
I myself participated, uh, given that I did not have any inside information to this, uh, a little bit of shitposting on, you know, runes 2.0 and 3.0.
We saw this meta be very strong with the ear-early ordinals meta as new techn-tech, tech-like, uh, recursive inscriptions were rolled out.
But, but anyway, um, the degens didn't really know what programmable runes were, and so it spawned several Twitter spaces, a lot of speculation.
Frankly, nobody knew what programmable runes are until today, so it's been a bit of a carrot on a... dangled on a string in front of the ordinals and runes people narrative.
I speculated, because I didn't have any idea, that it could be in relation to something to do with a concept on Bitcoin called covenants, which is, uh, kind of one of the things that some of these softwares like Opcat or OpCTV would unlock, which allows you to constrain future spending conditions of Bitcoin.
Basically allows you to do interesting things with how you do Bitcoin transactions. And maybe because runes are on top of that, um, programmable runes might have something to do with covenants. Um, I don't...
Still don't have a lot of clarification, but I'm just gonna cut to the chase here. So today, um, the enigmatic, unspecified programmable runes team, uh, was named. Isabelle dropped the name of Judo Flexchop.
Um, Judo Flexchop is one of the, like, lead technical people for the Oil Dynamics team. I interviewed them on Bitcoin Season two, uh, a month and a half ago.
So if you're interested about that, I did an interview with some of the Oil Dynamics team on their products a month and a half ago.
I think it's really interesting talking about the state of indexing and providing, um, kind of, uh, packaged, prepackaged, uh, APIs and indexes you could pull from.
So it'd be natural for, um, someone on the tech side of that team to, uh, you know, iterate on, um, some of the ideas. So here we have Isabelle tweeting just, you know, thirty minutes ago.
So it's a moving, it's a evolving, it's a fluid situation. Tweeting that, "Programmable Runes team has been made aware of a number of scams falsely claiming to be the team in question.
For the sake of consumer protection, the team has decided to doxx its creator, Judo Flexchop. Going forward, all announcements to the sub protocol will come exclusively from their account."
By the way, this protocol has been named the Proto-Runes by its creator. So I think the new, uh, hot word that everyone's going to lose their minds about is Proto-Runes. So more on this as it develops.
I, I personally, uh, don't think this is worth, uh, obsessing over right now, and if you are, uh, listening to this, I would say take a big chill pill, go back under your rock, turn off the internet for, you know, a whole, uh, hour and just take a deep breath and realize that we are starved for narrative.
So, um, moving on. What is next? Oh, sorry, we're still on news happening this week.
The other news this week, and this could be at the center of why, uh, everything is going down, I don't think it's the driver, but it's certainly, you know, related to, is that Mt.
Gox is, uh, announcing that they're finally going to repay, um, uh, customers or OG Mt. Gox customers under the, under the rehabilitation plan.
So they'll be distributing-Um, something like, what is it, 6 billion, 7 billion? I don't know. A lot of Bitcoin, several billion in Bitcoin, um, of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash from the original Mt.
Gox hack, which was over a decade ago. So, um, this is anticipated to put some sell pressure on Bitcoin.
I personally, and I think a lot of people have been in this space a long time, don't think this is going to be a huge driver of sell pressure long term, but this is important to keep in mind.
I think this is probably one of the most notable, again, m- m- one of the more notable things in, in this week in news.
Um, it seems to me, just kind of reflecting on this past week, that a lot of the price action, a lot of the narrative in the Bitcoin space has been largely speculative.
Um, people doing, uh, a lot of decisions for their, uh, uh, for their Bitcoin strategy based upon, uh, very, I'd say, not very well-understood information.
And, uh, I would just say this is kind of baked into how, uh, a lot of the speculative fervor of these ecosystems work, but also, um, just relax everybody, Bitcoin's gonna be fine.
We just have to survive until Bitcoin Nashville, um, and, uh, just survive till the end of the year. Um, speaking of Bitcoin Nashville,
um, for what's next, I, uh, I am looking forward to the Inscribing Nashville conference. We have, uh, kind of a who's who of the space, uh, ICO, Famojis, Nolsha, Pizza Ninjas.
Um, we, it's, you know, the who's who is speaking, Casey, Trevor, Udi, Aaron, Raph, Jan, Parker Day. The first time they will be speaking, uh, publicly, as far as I'm aware, to a, an Ordinals audience.
Parker Day is the artist of Casey's first, like, known collection that he's been inscribing and I anticipate will release. So, um, that's for what's next.
I will wrap up this episode by making one, um, perhaps spicy observation about the landscape of Ordinals collections.
So I've been in a lot of these spaces this past week and listening to a lot of the discourse, and there's a lot of people talking about, well, which collections should you own? NodeMonkes are down to.16 BTC.
Puppets are down to.10 BTC. OMB down to.19 BTC. I love all these collections. I, disclosure, I own most everything.
But I want to point out that there's a couple collections which I feel like don't get as much discourse in the, um, like, degen community because maybe, uh, [chuckles] they, uh, aren't as viral to the degens, and those are Quantum Cats and Pizza Ninjas.
And if we look at Pizza Ninjas, um, they, of all the collections, Bitcoin, or Ordinals collections' floor prices have been hemorrhaging the past two or three months.
But Pizza Ninjas have been relatively stable in, in Bitcoin-denominated terms. They're only down, um, like forty percent.
I, I know that's a lot, but from all-time high, but, like, they're only down forty percent, and really only down from laun- and they're actually technically up from launch still.
So I think this is pretty interesting because, uh, perhaps maybe Pizza Ninjas, uh, by some of the, by some folks are perceived as, like, um, not as cool for, for some reason.
I won't make a, a, uh, a normative statement on that right here.
But I think this is interesting that I f- that I feel that some of the, the more stable floors of the collections are, have come from collections which are, um, in certain corners of the community perceived not as, not as cool.
Um, so Quantum Cats here, uh, also incredibly stable. Um, only down forty percent again from their all-time high, maintained a pretty strong floor price, um, above.2.
Um, one of the only, like, top, like, uh, collections which achieved at over a half, half a Bitcoin floor price, uh, and has stayed above.22. So I think this is interesting.
Maybe I'm rambling a bit here, but I will wrap this up by saying, uh, you know, check your preconceptions. I've had to check my preconceptions a lot this past year. Um, make sure to stay tuned for Bitcoin Season 2.
This Thursday, I'm dropping a fascinating conversation with Leo Jiang of Alchemia, a, uh, fee rate, uh, uh, a very cool tool and product to let you hedge and speculate and, o- on the fee rate of Bitcoin.
We had some very high-level discussions on just block space and fees in general, which I think you would really enjoy. So that comes out this Thursday. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining Bitcoin Season 2.
I will see you next week.
[upbeat music]