Bitcoin transaction fees have experienced a significant decline following the recent halving event, providing relief to users and miners alike.

Initially, after the halving, fees soared to unprecedented levels, reaching as high as $146 for medium-priority transactions and $170 for high-priority transactions.

However, recent data from Mempool.space indicates a remarkable reduction in fees, with medium-priority transactions now costing $8.48 and high-priority transactions priced at $9.32.

This substantial decrease in transaction fees comes as a relief to Bitcoin users, who were facing exorbitant costs in the immediate aftermath of the halving.

Additionally, the hash price index, a metric reflecting miners’ potential earnings from a given amount of hash rate, has also declined significantly post-halving. This drop from $182.98 per hash/day to $81 indicates a substantial decrease in mining profitability.

While miners had hoped that the introduction of the Runes protocol, designed to create fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, would offset revenue losses post-halving, initial results suggest otherwise.

Despite expectations, floor prices for the Runes NFT collection have plummeted by nearly 50% in the last 24 hours, indicating a lack of significant activity and revenue generation from the protocol.

In contrast, ordinal collections like Bitcoin Puppets and NodeMonkes have seen increases in floor prices, highlighting the uncertainty surrounding the revenue potential of different NFT projects in the post-halving landscape.

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Shiba Inu, an Ethereum-based ecosystem featuring the second-largest token SHIB, has successfully raised $12 million in a recent token sale aimed at constructing a privacy-centric blockchain, as per a press release on Monday.

The investment round saw participation from notable investors including Comma 3 Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Cypher Capital, Shima Capital, Hercules Ventures, Animoca Brands, Morningstar Ventures, Woodstock Fund, DWF Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Stake Capital, Illuminati Digital Capital, Primal Capital, Mechanism Capital, and Spirit Dao. These investors acquired the new network’s forthcoming utility and governance token, TREAT.

The token sale was conducted by Shiba Inu Mint S.A., an ecosystem development company registered in Panama, according to the press release.

The fundraising initiative follows a previous report by CoinDesk in February, revealing that Shiba Inu developers were collaborating with cryptography firm Zama to develop a privacy-focused network atop Shibarium, the ecosystem’s Ethereum-based layer-2 blockchain. This new network is set to utilize Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a privacy tool enabling developers to utilize data on untrusted domains without requiring decryption.

SHIB, the associated token, experienced a 2.2% increase over the past 24 hours, mirroring the general uptrend of the CoinDesk 20 Index. With a market capitalization of nearly $16 billion, SHIB currently ranks as the 12th-largest cryptocurrency.

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Market volatility has led to over $152 million in cryptocurrency liquidations over the past day, with the wider cryptocurrency market witnessing over $290 million in liquidations within the same period. Of these liquidations, approximately $154 million were from long positions.

Bitcoin’s liquidations soared to over $108 million as the asset dipped below the $60,000 mark before rebounding. Presently, it struggles to maintain its position above $64,000. Coinglass data reveals that liquidations were almost evenly split between bitcoin longs and shorts, totaling just over $54 million and $53 million, respectively.

The largest digital asset by market capitalization increased by around 5.3% in the past 24 hours, trading at $64,739 at 5:22 a.m. ET, according to The Block’s Price Page. The GM 30 Index, representing a selection of the top 30 cryptocurrencies, rose by 4.46% to 129.97 in the same period.

According to The Block’s halving countdown, Bitcoin’s upcoming halving event, where the miners’ block subsidy reward gets halved, is less than 100 blocks away. Analysts from 21Shares suggested that Bitcoin may continue in a lateral movement until geopolitical concerns, such as conflicts in the Middle East and control of oil transportation routes, stabilize.

The analysts observed that if geopolitical risks stabilize, bitcoin is expected to continue its upward trend post-halving. This is anticipated to be supported by increasing institutional interest in digital assets, particularly driven by U.S. spots and recently approved Hong Kong ETFs.

Coinbase analyst David Han emphasized the impact of macroeconomic factors, particularly heightened geopolitical tensions, on short-term crypto activity. “The recent elevated correlation of altcoins against bitcoin underlines this, indicating bitcoin’s anchor role in the space even as it firms its position as a macro asset,” Han stated in this week’s Coinbase Monthly Outlook report.

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