Bitcoin BRC-20 Token Prices Plunge Ahead of Halving—Are Runes to Blame?

Fungible Bitcoin tokens, released under the BRC-20 standard, are taking a beating five days before the Bitcoin halving and the concurrent launch of the Runes protocol.

Four of the top five BRC-20-based tokens by market capitalization—ORDI (ORDI), SATS (SATS), Multibit (MUBI), and Ordiswap (ORDS)—are down over the last seven days. Bitcoin Pups (PUPS) alone is up, rising over 139% for the week, according to CoinGecko.

ORDI is trading at $42.67, down 43.4% for the week. SATS is at $0.00000027, down $46.6% for the last seven days. Still riding a wave of interest, meanwhile, the dog-themed meme coin, Bitcoin Pups, surged 1,000% last week to a $365 million market capitalization.

"BRC20 as a whole isn’t really down. Pups and other meme BRC-20s are pumping. It’s mostly Ordi that’s down," General Partner at Unbroken Chain, Isabel Foxen Duke told Decrypt. "Pups really drove the pump, and that’s 100% because of Runes."

Less popular BRC-20 tokens are having a good start to the week. Piza (PIZA), currently trading at $1.50, is up 635.9% for the week, and Pepe (PEPE), which is trading at $0.63, is up 137.5% for the week.

Launched in April 2023, Ordi was the first token minted using the BRC-20 standard created by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer Domo.

In March, ORDI hit an all-time high of $95.52 and surpassed a market capitalization of $928 million. A steady decline set in over the following weeks, however, leaving the popular token down 53% from its all-time high and pushing it out of the top 100 BRC-20 coins on Monday.

"Ordi is clearly [correlated] with altcoins, not with Bitcoin," Foxen Duke said. "This is likely because centralized exchange OkX has such a huge part of the volume, and alts are bleeding at the moment."

Even inscription bridges were not spared the downturn. BRC-20-based EVM tokens are down for the week, including Multibit’s MUBI is trading at $0.15, down 1.9% for the week, and Ordiswap (ORDS) is $0.13, down 29.8% for the week.

Foxen Duke believes that liquidity is coming out of the various Ordinals projects to prepare for the launch of the Runes protocol, adding that the liquidity could be cycled back into Oridinals after the Runes hype eventually dies down.

"People are definitely prepping to trade into Runes," Foxen Duke said. "People want liquidity going into the halvening so they can take advantage of whatever Runes has to offer."

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.