The latest Bitcoin halving took place late Friday, cutting miner rewards in half for the fourth time in history—but BTC itself is hardly the biggest winner in the crypto markets this weekend. Instead, it’s meme coins leading the charge, with some prominent tokens marking sizable double-digit percentage jumps in the last day.

Dog-themed coins are the biggest winners so far this weekend, with the Solana-based BONK charting a massive 37% jump in price over the last 24 hours alone, jumping to a current price of $0.000021 per data from CoinGecko. BONK has effectively returned to where it was before plunging on April 12 alongside much of the rest of the market.

While BONK has seen the largest swing so far among the top 100 coins by market cap, other pup-centric meme coins on Ethereum are faring well too: FLOKI has jumped nearly 19% over the last day to nearly $0.00017, and Shiba Inu (SHIB) is up 14% to a price above $0.000026.

Other hot meme coins at the moment include Ethereum’s PEPE, up 13% to nearly $0.000006, and the Solana-based Dogwifhat (WIF), which has climbed almost 8% to about $3.00.

What's Next for Bitcoin After the Halving?

Welcome to Bitcoin’s fifth epoch. Following the network’s programmed reduction in newly issued Bitcoin, a new era of digital scarcity has been ushered in. Like clockwork on Friday, the reward that miners earn for validating Bitcoin transactions was slashed in half for the fourth time since the blockchain’s launch. Bitcoin’s so-called halving occurred at just after 8pm ET on Friday. As a result, miners will earn 3.125 BTC per block created until some time likely in 2028. It’s part of miners’ dues...

Ethereum and Solana meme coin traders may be returning to familiar, established meme coins while other traders explore the new frontier of tokens minted via Runes, the new Bitcoin fungible token standard that launched alongside the halving. The protocol was created by Casey Rodarmor, inventor of the NFT-like Ordinals protocol.

There’s been immense hype around Runes as project creators raced to be one of the first to launch a Bitcoin token using the protocol, and users collectively spent millions to create and mint tokens during the first few blocks after the halving late Friday. But trading volume so far has been relatively modest, per data tracked by the OKX marketplace.

 Bitcoin Halvening Runes

The Race Is On to Mint One of the First Bitcoin Runes

With the Bitcoin halving only hours away, the race is on to mint the first tokens on the new Bitcoin Runes protocol set to launch alongside the quadrennial event. Runes is a new fungible token protocol on Bitcoin that will let users “etch” and mint tokens on top of the chain. It’s akin to the experimental BRC-20 standard launched last year, but is said to be more efficient—and comes from the inventor of the Ordinals protocol. In any case, as with the NFT-like Ordinals before it, project creators...

The most-traded Runes token over the last 24 hours, per OKX, is Satoshi Nakamoto, aptly named after the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The token has about $2.7 million worth of trading volume during that span, with a market cap of $136 million and a price of approximately $6.50 worth of Bitcoin.

That kind of market cap wouldn’t put the Satoshi Nakamoto token anywhere near the top 100 overall cryptocurrencies by market cap, per CoinGecko, which gives some sense of the current size of demand for early Runes. But some traders are betting that these early Runes will see wider interest in time as trading tools improve and the protocol becomes more established.

Bitcoin itself has failed to generate much short-term momentum after the halving. It’s up about 1.5% on the day to a current price just below $65,000, and at most has only climbed to about a 3% gain since the Friday night event.

Will the Bitcoin Halving Make BTC's Environmental Impact Better—or Worse?

With the latest Bitcoin halving set for tonight, the network underlying the world’s largest cryptocurrency is set to undergo its biggest change in years. Much has been prognosticated about how the shift will impact BTC’s price and the broader crypto market. But how will the halving impact Bitcoin’s controversial, oft-debated, and undeniably massive impact on the environment?  The answer, it turns out, is complicated.  By reducing BTC mining rewards by 50%, Bitcoin’s latest halving will once agai...

But historically, Bitcoin’s biggest post-halving gains come several months later as the effects of the slowing supply increase start to be felt across the ecosystem.

Besides, this has been a unique cycle in that Bitcoin actually set a new all-time high price in March, breaking its 2021 peak ahead of the halving, amid the rise of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Post-halving price action this time around is entering uncharted territory.