Bitcoin payouts are higher than Ethereum for 3 days in a row during the halving.

As miners and traders prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving and, to a lesser extent, the introduction of Runes on Bitcoin, the payout on Bitcoin has surpassed Ethereum for three consecutive days.

Bitcoin miners earned $7.47 million on April 17 — about $160,000 more than the $7.31 million paid to Ethereum shareholders, according to Crypto Payments.

Between April 15th and 16th, Bitcoin miners earned $9.98 million and $5.91 million respectively – beating out Ethereum miners by $3.5 million and $1.1 million on those days.

Ethereum, however, holds a narrow lead with a 7-day average payout of $8.55 million compared to Bitcoin's $7.57 million.

Bitcoin transaction fees are determined by the transaction size or data volume and the blockspace demand at the time of the transaction request.

The increase in Bitcoin (BTC) fees comes at a critical time for Bitcoin miners as the April 20 Bitcoin halving event will see the mining subsidy cut from 6.25 BTC ($398,000) to 3.125 BTC ($199,000).

Currently, about 900 bitcoins are produced per day, which is equivalent to $57.2 million at current prices.

Using the April 17 payment count of $7.47 million, this means that transaction fees account for 11.5% of the Bitcoin mining industry's total block rewards.

However, the share of block rewards in transaction fees will increase significantly after the halving event as approximately 450 Bitcoin will be released at that time.

At least in the short term, they will rely more on higher fees and higher Bitcoin prices to make up for the fall in revenue.

Meanwhile, the introduction of NFT-like runes in January 2023 helped Bitcoin miners generate more revenue than transaction fees – and a new revenue stream, Runes, a new Bitcoin token standard, will be released when the halving occurs. 840,000.

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Runes competes with Ordinals, aiming to make it easier for memecoin enthusiasts and other community-driven audiences to create fungibles on Bitcoin.

Casey Rodermore, the creator of Ordinal, says Runes are completely UTXO-based, so Bitcoin shouldn't be spammed like Ordinals.

The recent spike in Bitcoin payouts may have been partly caused by the BRC-20 token prices in recent days as some traders shifted their focus to Runes.

Ordinary (ORDI) and Sats (SATS), the two largest BRC-20s by market capitalization, fell 38% and 43% respectively last week, according to CoinMarketCap.

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