The hype around Bitcoin Loon died down and trading volume plummeted 84%.

The Bitcoin Runes protocol is struggling to maintain its share of Bitcoin transactions. After launch on April 20, Runes trading dominated Bitcoin blockchain traffic for eight days, mainly over weekends.

The launch of Bitcoin Loon coincided with the fourth Bitcoin halving. The resulting hype led to a surge in trading volume on the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin (BTC) mining revenues surpassed $100 million for the first time, reaching an all-time high of $107.7 million in daily profits.

Transactions under the Runes protocol accounted for more than 50% of all Bitcoin transactions as of April 24. The peak occurred on April 23, when these transactions accounted for 81.3% of bandwidth. However, by May 2, this figure had dropped to 11.1%.

As you can see in the dune chart above, interest in runes picked up again the following weekend, May 4th, 5th, and 6th. However, it showed a downward trend after that.

As of May 22, Loon accounts for 12.7% of Bitcoin transactions, significantly higher than Bitcoin Ordinal (0.7%) and BRC-20 (1.5%). The rest was taken by BTC. As a result, rune trading has fallen by more than 84% since its all-time high.

Related: Rune and BRC-20 are just stepping stones to Bitcoin DeFi.

Loon is part of a broader developer movement known as Bitcoin Decentralized Finance (DeFi), or BTCFi, which aims to add more utility to the Bitcoin network. With the addition of the newly released protocols Ordinals and BRC-20, the Bitcoin network reached an all-time high of 926,000 daily transactions.

However, the real market opportunity associated with the Runes protocol may only emerge several months after the first wave of investor hype subsides.

Nazar Khan, co-founder and CEO of TeraWulf, said in an interview with Cointelegraph: “It will be the use cases and value derived from that block space.”

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