This week was supposed to be the moment that fungible tokens on Bitcoin rocketed to prominence. Although some fungible tokens like the billion-dollar ORDI have gained modest popularity using standards like BRC-20 and STAMPS’ SRC-20, a brand new protocol was supposed to supersede these expensive, slow, and data-intensive standards. On April 20, the day of the Bitcoin halving, Ordinals founder Casey Rodarmor launched his next-generation fungible token protocol, Runes. Hundreds of thousands of wallets minted new Runes, paying all-time high Bitcoin transaction fees. Runes promised to be a more professional, less expensive, faster, and more seamless protocol for launching altcoins on Bitcoin. Rodarmor coded Runes because, in his words, “Fungible tokens are 99.9% scams and memes. However, they don’t appear to be going away any time soon.” In short, Rodarmor launched Runes to bring meme coins to Bitcoin. When the halving occurred late Friday night, many fans of Rodarmor were busy working instead of celebrating. Many speculators wanted to mint a Rune within the first block of Bitcoin’s halving, paying astronomical fees alongside other users bidding for inclusion in that historically important block. All told, Bitcoin speculators paid $2.4 million dollars to miners to store less than 4MB of transaction data within Bitcoin’s 840,000th block. Two days later, many Runes prices have already started cratering. Five of the top eight Runes listed on Unisat have declined over the past 24 hours along with 27 of the top 40 on OKX.