Each day, Coinrule will run through the state of the digital assets market for Blockbeat, your home for news, analysis, opinion and commentary on blockchain and digital assets.
By the time you read this, Bitcoin will have completed its 4th Halving. The issuance rate of Bitcoin is designed to drop by half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every 4 years. This increases Bitcoin’s scarcity and makes it harder to mine. However, no developers press a deploy button, and there is no big announcement at a tech conference – the code just executes. The last Halving will occur around the year 2140 when the last of 21 million Bitcoin is mined.
Bitcoin enters this Halving as a trillion dollar asset. It is on the balance sheet of listed companies like Reddit and Tesla. The largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, has launched an ETF for it. The state of El Salvador is accumulating. These are incredible achievements for a digital currency launched by an anonymous creator, it is much more of a movement than it is a tech company.
Traditionalists from the financial world might still think of it as a pointless scam, but clearly the market continues to see value in a credibly neutral and permission-less financial layer. More innovation is also slowly coming to Bitcoin. The Runes network, launched at the time of the Halving, enables the creation of tokens on top of Bitcoin. The endgame for blockchains will be the applications built on them. At the Halving, we are not only celebrating Bitcoin’s continuous existence, but also the innovation it will continue to enable.