Alkanes Claimed 61% of Bitcoin Transactions for 90 Days, and Most Analysts Missed It
Daily data from protocol maintainer SUBFROST shows Alkanes accounted for 61.1% of Bitcoin transactions between June 23 and September 20, roughly 59.9 million of them. Nearly all of that activity traces back to a single mint function, and the user base is almost entirely in Asia Pacific. The June attribution calls that pointed to Runes and Ordinals got the wrapper right and the protocol wrong.
Something odd happened to Bitcoin's transaction count over the summer, and the people who usually explain these things got it wrong. Between June 23 and September 20, a metaprotocol called Alkanes accounted for 61.1% of all Bitcoin transactions, according to daily figures published by SUBFROST, the firm that maintains it. That's roughly 59.9 million transactions across blocks 954,917 through 967,918.
The block space numbers tell a sharper story than the transaction count does. Alkanes used 40.3% of block space by weight, 94.2% of all OP_RETURN bytes, and 13.4% of transaction fee revenue in that window. Read those three figures together and you get the shape of the trade. Almost every OP_RETURN output on Bitcoin for three months belonged to this protocol, and it paid a thin slice of the fees to claim them.
Why nobody named it's the interesting part. In June, CryptoQuant and Glassnode both flagged daily transactions above 800,000, the highest since late 2024, and pinned the runestone surge on Runes, Ordinals, and BRC-20. Alkanes runs on top of Runes, which is exactly why the wrapper hid it. Renaud Cuny, who publishes Bitcoin Block Space Weekly, counted Alkanes protostones at 91% of OP_RETURN outputs across a separate 60-day window. The second look found it. The first one didn't.
And here's what allocators should sit with. SUBFROST says 99.7% of UNCOMMON•GOODS Runes mints in the window were also DIESEL mints, the emission function on Alkanes' genesis contract.
One mint. One contract. Nearly 60 million transactions wearing its name.
The user base is overwhelmingly Asia Pacific. SUBFROST ships full Chinese documentation, runs a Chinese-language Telegram for DIESEL, and took a booth at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong. Alkanes launched at block 880,000 on January 20, 2025, built at Oyl Corp, which said in January 2026 that it was winding down and handing protocol maintenance to SUBFROST. It doesn't touch consensus and it isn't a sidechain. Contract code sits in witness data as WebAssembly, and a separate indexer called Metashrew executes the calls.
Miners collected that 13.4%, which is the only piece of this that lands in a cash flow statement. The custody question remains the gating factor for most allocators. So watch whether the next round of on-chain attribution reports names Alkanes, because if it doesn't, the data's still wrong.