SUBFROST Data: Alkanes accounted for 61.1% of Bitcoin trading volume in the last 90 days

The Bitcoin Meta Protocol Alkanes, maintained by SUBFROST, announced that data shows from June 23 to September 20, corresponding to block heights 954,917 to 967,918, Alkanes transactions accounted for 61.1% of all Bitcoin transactions, approximately 59.9 million transactions. During the same period, Alkanes accounted for 40.3% of block space weight, 94.2% of OP_RETURN byte count, and 13.4% of transaction fee revenue. The data comes from documents published daily by SUBFROST under the MIT license, with real-time charts available at subfrost.io/metrics.

Alkanes is a Bitcoin meta protocol built on the Runes protocol, maintained by the company SUBFROST, which is focused on the U.S. market, co-founded by Gabe Lee and the original author of the protocol, RWP IV. The company claims that its community is almost entirely from the Asia-Pacific region, providing complete Chinese documentation and a Chinese data page, and operates an official Chinese Telegram for DIESEL; this year the company held seminars in China and set up a booth at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong.

On the technical side, Alkanes does not alter Bitcoin consensus and does not operate as a sidechain. Its contract code is WebAssembly, deployed once in the witness data, and subsequent users send function calls via runestone in Runes format, executed by the independent indexer Metashrew; full nodes only confirm Bitcoin transactions and do not verify Alkanes balances.