Alkanes by the Numbers

We are not quoting anyone. We counted it.

Most claims about how much of Bitcoin is "Alkanes," or "Runes," or "Ordinals" come from someone else's dashboard. We decode every block on Bitcoin, read the OP_RETURN output of each transaction, and classify it as an Alkanes protostone, a Runes runestone, or something else entirely. The numbers below come straight from that decode. The live version is public, and every chart in this piece is the same chart you will find on our metrics page, in the same order, so you can check any of them against the live data the day you read this.

Two ground rules before the charts. First, this is a full census — we decode every single block, from the DIESEL genesis block to the last complete day, with no sampling. Second, everything here is raw daily data. No moving averages, no smoothing. Where a line is noisy, that is Bitcoin being noisy, and you get to see it.

The daily pulse

The place to start is the raw heartbeat: day by day, how much of Bitcoin's transaction volume is Alkanes, and how much of it carries an OP_RETURN at all.

Daily Alkanes share of all Bitcoin transactions, and the share of all transactions carrying an OP_RETURN. Raw daily, since the DIESEL genesis block (880,000, January 2025).

Two things jump out. The lines are volatile, because Bitcoin's daily mix is volatile. And they climb together: from near zero at the genesis of DIESEL to a sustained majority, with the most recent 60 days around 60% of all Bitcoin transactions. The gap between the two lines is also worth watching, because it keeps shrinking. OP_RETURN traffic on Bitcoin is, increasingly, just Alkanes.

That convergence is its own chart. Of the transactions that carry an OP_RETURN, here is the share that is Alkanes, counted two ways.

Of every transaction carrying an OP_RETURN: the share that is Alkanes by transaction count, and the share of OP_RETURN bytes that is Alkanes. Raw daily, since genesis.

On recent days both lines sit in the high nineties. Whatever OP_RETURN is being used for on Bitcoin today, it includes Alkanes almost every time.

The strictest test: block space

Transaction counts have a fair objection: you can inflate them with small, cheap transactions. So measure the thing miners actually sell, block weight. This cannot be gamed by making transactions tiny.

Daily share of all Bitcoin block weight consumed by Alkanes transactions. Raw daily, since genesis. Transactions that carry both an Alkanes protostone and an UNCOMMON•GOODS mint count once, as Alkanes — see “Why people see Runes” below.

By weight, Alkanes went from nothing to about 40% of all Bitcoin block space over the last 60 days. Smaller than the transaction share, exactly as you would expect from small transactions, and still an enormous fraction of Bitcoin's capacity.

Ask "how much of Bitcoin is Alkanes" and the honest reply is a question back: counted how? Here are the three answers on one chart.

Alkanes' share of Bitcoin by transaction count, by block weight, and by OP_RETURN bytes. Raw daily, since genesis.

By bytes Alkanes is almost everything. By count it is a clear majority. By weight it is around forty percent and rising. All three are real answers, and this piece walks each one. Picking to show just a single number would be either a boast or an undersell.

And if you want the single most current snapshot, here is the most recent complete day, narrowed to OP_RETURN traffic.

The most recent complete day, a full census of that day. Almost the entire ring is Alkanes — including the DIESEL mints that also carry an UNCOMMON•GOODS runestone, which count once, as Alkanes.

What the activity actually is: DIESEL

Here is the part most "Bitcoin is busy" takes leave out, and the part we will not. Almost all of this Alkanes activity is one operation, the DIESEL mint. On its own, with no other Alkanes traffic counted, the DIESEL mint is a huge share of all Bitcoin transactions.

DIESEL mints alone as a share of ALL Bitcoin transactions. Raw daily, since genesis.

That is not a knock. DIESEL minting is the heartbeat of the system, it runs every block, and its sheer volume is exactly why Alkanes dominates the charts. You can watch that heartbeat start. For the first half of 2025 it was a few hundred mints a day, when the protocol paid each block's DIESEL mint to a single winner — in practice, the DIESEL bot. Then a consensus change opened the mint to everyone who mints in a block, and the daily count stepped up by three orders of magnitude and never came back down.

Estimated DIESEL mints per day, log scale so the early days stay visible. Raw daily, since genesis. The peak runs around 518,000 mints in a day — and it is running at that peak now, a year and a half after DIESEL launched. This is not a short-term trend.

The running total: past 58 million DIESEL mints since the genesis block.

"Most of Bitcoin is Alkanes" and "most of that is one repeated operation" are both true, and an honest data piece says both.

Why people see "Runes" when they look

Here is the trap that fools almost everyone. Open one of these DIESEL mints in a normal block explorer and you will usually see a Runes mint staring back at you, specifically the rune UNCOMMON•GOODS, the free rune hardcoded when Runes launched. People watch the mempool, see UNCOMMON•GOODS minting over and over, and conclude that Runes drives Bitcoin's traffic.

It is the same bytes telling two different stories. Alkanes is protorunes-compatible, so a DIESEL mint rides inside a Runes-style runestone, and that runestone also carries an UNCOMMON•GOODS mint. A Runes-only indexer reads the UNCOMMON•GOODS part and stops. Our decoder reads the Alkanes protostone in the very same output and sees what the transaction actually does: mint DIESEL.

We can put a number on the trap.

Of all UNCOMMON•GOODS mints each day, the share that are in fact DIESEL mints. Raw daily, since genesis. From near zero to about 99%.

Daily UNCOMMON•GOODS mints, split into the DIESEL-driven ones and genuinely independent Runes mints. Raw counts, stacked. DIESEL takes the whole thing over.

So the next time someone points at a wall of UNCOMMON•GOODS mints as proof that Runes is carrying Bitcoin, they are, more often than not, pointing at DIESEL wearing a Runes coat. It is the single biggest reason this activity gets miscredited to Runes, and the whole reason you need a decoder that understands Alkanes, not just Runes, to count it correctly.

Head to head: Alkanes versus Runes (non-Alkanes)

A note on naming first. A runestone can carry an Alkanes protostone inside it, so when we say Runes (non-Alkanes) we mean the runestones that do not, the plain Runes activity everyone pictures. With that settled, put the two side by side on the byte budget.

Daily share of all OP_RETURN bytes written by Alkanes versus by non-Alkanes Runes, since genesis. The crossover happens in 2025 and never reverses.

The same comparison in absolute bytes per day, log scale. Alkanes pulls away by orders of magnitude.

The whole OP_RETURN byte budget, day by day: Alkanes, non-Alkanes Runes, and everything else. The green band (Alkanes) swallows everything.

The cleanest way to answer the critic who says "but I see Runes everywhere" is to take every runestone-carrying transaction on Bitcoin and ask, one by one, does this runestone carry an Alkanes protostone or not? Runes owned this at the genesis of tracking. Today Alkanes is the overwhelming majority.

Of every runestone-carrying transaction, the daily share that is Alkanes versus non-Alkanes Runes, since genesis. The two trade the lead through 2025, then Alkanes takes it decisively; recent days run about 99% Alkanes.

The same split in absolute transactions per day, log scale. There is nowhere for the ambiguity to hide.

The byte budget

Averaged across the whole period, all the way back to the genesis block, even with the early Runes-heavy months included, the byte story holds.

All OP_RETURN data written to Bitcoin since the DIESEL genesis block: Alkanes 73%, non-Alkanes Runes 12%, other 15%.

One more honest cut, because it explains the byte dominance. Alkanes payloads are small. An Alkanes OP_RETURN runs around 21 bytes per transaction, well under a typical non-Alkanes OP_RETURN. Alkanes wins the byte budget on volume, not on size.

Alkanes is starting to pay Bitcoin's bills

Transaction share is one thing. Paying for block space is another, and it is the one miners actually feel. Before any Alkanes number, get the scale of miner income right, because it is two very different pieces. Miners earn a fixed block subsidy, 3.125 BTC per block, about 450 BTC a day, roughly $31M a day at recent prices. On top of that they earn the transaction fees users pay, which over the last 60 days averaged about $220K a day, less than 1% of the total earnings. The subsidy is printed by the protocol no matter what anyone does on-chain; the fees are the only part that activity can move.

Total daily Bitcoin miner revenue in USD, subsidy plus fees. Yes, it really is around $30 million a day, and almost all of it is the fixed subsidy, which is why most of the swing in this chart is just the Bitcoin price.

Every Alkanes percentage from here down is a share of that fee slice only, never of total miner revenue. With the scale set, here is Alkanes' share of the daily fees.

Alkanes' share of all Bitcoin transaction fees, raw daily since genesis. About 16% over the last 60 days, with days above a quarter in late June.

The fee share is smaller than the transaction share, and that is expected, not a contradiction. DIESEL mints are small, cheap transactions. Per transaction, Alkanes pays on the order of 130 satoshis while the rest of Bitcoin's traffic pays closer to 1,000.

Average fee per transaction in sats, Alkanes versus all other transactions, raw daily. Days with fewer than 50 Alkanes transactions are left blank rather than averaged, which is why the green line starts with gaps in early 2025.

There is a sanity check built into all of this. Because every Alkanes transaction is an OP_RETURN transaction, Alkanes can never pay a larger share of fees than OP_RETURN traffic as a whole, in the same window. It never does: over the last 60 days Alkanes paid about 15.9% of all fees while OP_RETURN transactions together paid about 18.6%. The arithmetic holds, always.

And to say the humbling version out loud rather than bury it: 16% of the fees is about 0.1% of total miner income today, because fees themselves are under 1% of what miners earn. That is not a weakness of the measurement, it is the point of it. The subsidy halves every four years; the fee slice is the part of Bitcoin's security budget that has to grow, and Alkanes is one of the few things on-chain visibly growing it.

The honest part

A full census, every block. We decode every block and every transaction's OP_RETURN, from the DIESEL genesis block to the last complete day — no sampling, no gaps. Two rules are fixed and blind to the values, which is what keeps this from becoming bias: the current, still-running day is never plotted, and a chart never shows a day its own data has not fully reached, so the block-weight and runestone breakdowns, which are added by a separate pass a day or two behind, simply end a day or two earlier than the rest. Per-day counts are scaled to a standard 144-block day; shares and percentages are exact ratios where any scaling cancels.

Raw daily, deliberately. Every chart here plots the raw daily value. Daily Bitcoin is noisy: quiet Sundays, fee spikes, mint waves. Smoothing would make prettier lines and weaker evidence. The trends in this piece survive the noise, which is the point of showing it.

Windows are labeled. Full-period averages (like the 73% byte donut) fold in the early ramp and are lower than recent months. Recent windows are higher. Every figure says which one it uses.

Most of this is one operation. The DIESEL mint is the vast majority of Alkanes activity. Read "most of Bitcoin is Alkanes" as "most of Bitcoin's transactions are Alkanes traffic," not "Bitcoin runs a thousand diverse apps." The diversity is the next chapter, not this one.

And none of this is financial advice. It is a measurement, published with its method, so you can argue with the method instead of taking the number on faith.

Reproduce it, don't trust it

Every layer of this pipeline is public and MIT licensed, and each piece is small enough to read in an afternoon. The decoder turns a single transaction's OP_RETURN into its runestone, protostones and cellpack. The scanner walks the chain block by block and writes the daily census. The data repository holds the full history.csv plus the exact generator that renders every figure in this article.

git clone https://github.com/Vdto88/alkanes-opreturn-stats
cd alkanes-opreturn-stats/figures
python gen-fig-13.py   # Python 3, stdlib only. Prints every headline number and writes the SVGs.

Run it and diff your charts against ours. If your numbers disagree, open an issue. That is the point of publishing the pipeline instead of a screenshot.

Why we bother counting

Anyone can say Bitcoin is busy. We wanted to know with what, precisely enough to defend the numbers, so we built the decoder and left it running. The answer it keeps returning is that the most-used thing on Bitcoin, by transactions and by bytes, is a smart-contract metaprotocol most media outlets are still unaware of, Alkanes. And it now pays a real, rising share of the fees that secure the Bitcoin blockchain.

That is the substrate. SUBFROST is what gets built on top of it: frBTC for atomic use of BTC in DeFi transactions, an AMM for Bitcoin-native assets, and DeFi vaults for yield and bonds, starting with our FIRE vault. The data is just the floor under all of it.

The numbers will have moved by the time you read this. The charts are live, the decode is reproducible, and the direction has not changed since genesis.

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All figures are from our own continuous decode of Bitcoin's OP_RETURN data (live dashboard: Alkanes OP_RETURN stats; the same charts, updated daily: subfrost.io/metrics). Full-period tracking runs from the DIESEL genesis block 880,000 (2025-01-20); the full-chain census covers every block through the last complete UTC day, and the current day is never plotted. "Alkanes" counts decoded Alkanes protostones; "Runes (non-Alkanes)" counts Runes runestones that are not Alkanes; fee figures use per-transaction fees and the daily BTC/USD rate recorded with each day; per-day counts are scaled to a 144-block day. Corroborating third-party measurement: Bitcoin Block Space Weekly, Issue #29 (Renaud Cuny, Jun 2026). This piece describes measurement, not price, and is not financial advice.