Alkanes Asian Market Drove 61% of Bitcoin Transactions for 90 Days, SUBFROST Data Shows

Bitcoin Magazine

Alkanes Asian Market Drove 61% of Bitcoin Transactions for 90 Days, SUBFROST Data Shows

A Bitcoin metaprotocol similar to Ordinals accounted for most Bitcoin transactions over a 90-day stretch ending in September, according to figures published by SUBFROST, which maintains the protocol.

SUBFROST said Alkanes transactions made up 61.1% of all Bitcoin transactions between June 23 and Sept. 20, covering blocks 954,917 through 967,918, or about 59.9 million transactions. In the same window, the company said Alkanes used 40.3% of block space by weight, 94.2% of OP_RETURN bytes, and 13.4% of transaction-fee revenue.

Alkanes is a Bitcoin metaprotocol that builds on top of the Runes protocol. It is maintained by SUBFROST, a U.S.-facing company led by co-founder Gabe Lee, with the original protocol author who goes by the name of RWP IV. The Alkanese community is almost entirely from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, revealing an active user base of Bitcoin-adjacent technology the West is likely not aware of. 

SUBFROST ships full Chinese documentation and a Chinese metrics page, and runs an official Chinese-language Telegram for DIESEL. In 2025, Chinese outlets noted that most Alkanes discussion on X came from Chinese-speaking users, many mentioning a popular Hong Kong wallet called UniSat. This year the company held a workshop in China, put Lee and RWP IV on a China stage, and took a booth at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong. 

The Onchain traffic figures are from a daily file SUBFROST publishes under an MIT license, with live charts at subfrost.io/metrics and the underlying series on GitHub. The company’s count treats a transaction as Alkanes when an OP_RETURN runestone contains a protostone with protocol tag 1.

In a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, SUBFROST said 99.7% of UNCOMMON•GOODS Runes mints in the window were also DIESEL mints. The emission function on Alkanes’ genesis contract. In a July explainer, the company wrote that “almost all of this Alkanes activity is one operation, the DIESEL mint.” A rune on top of a rune, if you will.

Alkanes does not change Bitcoin consensus and does not run as a sidechain. Contract code is WebAssembly, deployed once in witness data. Later users send function calls inside a Runes-format runestone. A separate indexer, Metashrew, executes those calls. Full nodes confirm the Bitcoin transaction; they do not validate Alkanes balances.

That wrapper is why the same activity showed up as Runes in June. CryptoQuant reported Bitcoin network activity at its highest level since late 2024, with daily transactions above 800,000, and tied the OP_RETURN surge to Runes, Ordinals, and BRC-20. Bitcoin Magazine carried that reading on June 22. CoinDesk, citing Glassnode, said daily transactions topped 820,000, with more than 600,000 runestones, and attributed the move to Runes. None of those reports named Alkanes.

Renaud Cuny, who writes Bitcoin Block Space Weekly and tracks BIP-110, separately counted Alkanes protostones as 91% of OP_RETURN outputs over a 60-day window.

Alkanes launched at block 880,000 on Jan. 20, 2025, when the DIESEL contract was deployed. It was built at Oyl Corp. Oyl said in January 2026 that it was winding down operations and that SUBFROST would lead protocol maintenance. 

This post Alkanes Asian Market Drove 61% of Bitcoin Transactions for 90 Days, SUBFROST Data Shows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.