Bitcoin Miners Score Big with $184 Million Revenue amid BRC-20 Token Boom and Ordinals Protocol

Bitcoin miners ended Q2 on a high note, raking in $184 million in transaction fees, says a Coin Metrics report. This major influx was primarily due to the popularity of BRC-20 tokens and the novel Ordinals protocol, according to decrypt.  

BRC-20 tokens were inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard. Since its introduction in March, the market cap of these tokens skyrocketed to over $240 million, according to CoinGecko.

To mint BRC-20 tokens, users submit a transaction and pay a fee. This encourages quick processing on the Bitcoin network. As the demand for these tokens grew, users were more than ready to pay extra for expedited transactions.

The arrival of the Ordinals protocol further stirred the Bitcoin community. This protocol lets users create NFT-like assets on Bitcoin by writing data to a single satoshi. Despite some resistance, Bitcoin proponent Michael Saylor emphasized Ordinals’ potential to keep miners profitable over the long haul.

The introduction of a new token standard, BRC-69, has further fueled the Ordinals boom. This innovative standard reduces the time and cost of inscriptions, bypassing the previous 4-megabyte limit.

In May, the fever pitch for BRC-20 tokens led to record-breaking transaction fees on Bitcoin. Miners’ earnings from transaction fees exceeded Bitcoin’s block subsidy, a phenomenon not seen since 2017.

Although the BRC-20 craze has cooled somewhat, miners are still seeing a substantial boost in earnings from transaction fees, according to Luxor Technologies CEO, Nick Hansen. Thus, the recent changes in Bitcoin’s token ecosystem have proven extremely profitable for miners.

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