When the Runes protocol launched in April 2024, it handed miners $62.55 million in transaction fees on day one. Some people thought "the fee era has finally arrived." Two years later, in 2026, the numbers tell a clearer story: a short-term fee spike can indeed give miners extra income for a day, but it cannot change a revenue structure that still depends mainly on block subsidies.
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The bottom line first: a one-time fee spike cannot save miners
By August 2026, transaction fees had fallen to just 0.69% of total miner revenue, close to the lowest level in a decade. Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft pointed out that the fee share has stayed below 1% for nearly a year — the last time this happened, Bitcoin's price was under $400.
The reason is simple: the fee growth brought by Runes was a one-time event.
On the day Runes launched in April 2024, it generated about $62.55 million in transaction fees. But by early 2026, daily fee revenue related to Runes had dropped below $250,000, making up only about 1.67% of total network transaction fees. Even when Runes briefly revived in June 2026 and daily transactions surpassed 820,000, Rune-related fees only accounted for about 25% of total network fees — and that "25%" was calculated on top of an extremely small fee pool. In July 2026, total miner revenue fell to $805 million, of which transaction fees were only $5.48 million.
Why a fee spike cannot improve overall miner profitability
1. Fee spikes are "event-driven," not "sustained-demand-driven"
A BYDFi analysis report describes the Runes fee trajectory as "event-driven congestion" — driven by speculative hype around something new, then quickly returning to normal once the hype fades. Speculators rush in early, projects distribute tokens once, and after that there is no reason for users to keep paying fees at that level.
2. The fee share is too small to support miners' books
Data from April 8, 2026, shows: miners earned 2.443 BTC in daily transaction fees, while daily block subsidies were about 450 BTC, putting the fee share at 0.54%. Even during Runes' most active period, the transaction fee share never came close to "replacing subsidies." JPMorgan estimated that about 20% of miners are operating at a loss, with the average Bitcoin mining cost around $78,000, while the Bitcoin price was hovering around $63,000.
3. Miners have already voted with their feet
When fee income is not enough, miners start pivoting. In the second quarter of 2026, the hashrate of listed mining companies fell by 13.4% over six months, dropping from 368.3 EH/s to 319.0 EH/s. Core Scientific's hosting revenue, mainly from AI, reached $136.7 million in the second quarter, accounting for 83% of sales and nearly five times its mining revenue. If fee spikes really could "improve miner profitability," miners would not be freeing up power and machines for AI.
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So can a fee spike actually improve profitability?
Yes, but only for that day and the next few days. During the first days after Runes launched in April 2024, miners did earn extra income, and in some individual blocks, transaction fees even exceeded the block reward. But that kind of "improvement" was temporary and unsustainable.
This actually highlights the core problem of Bitcoin's long-term security mechanism: block subsidies are halved every four years, and in the future transaction fees must support the security budget. But the current fee market is still far from being able to hold that weight. At the Bitcoin++ conference in July 2026, Peter Todd once again raised the discussion of "tail emission" — keeping an extremely low level of ongoing subsidy after new coin issuance ends — to address this problem. Community reaction was largely negative, but the existence of the problem itself already says a lot.
How you can verify this yourself: open The Block or Glassnode and look at two indicators — total miner revenue trend, which in July had already fallen to its lowest level since 2015, and transaction fee share, currently at 0.69%. If the fee share does not recover steadily, a fee spike is just an event, not a structural improvement. Those two numbers can tell you whether miners are actually doing any better.
