The OP_RETURN observer: Will we witness a new spam wave?

[Smartprofit]

I suspect that what's happening now isn't the inclusion of "heavy data" in blocks (we've seen that in the past), but something else. New L2 protocols include their hashes in Bitcoin blocks. This is done to ensure proof security. In other words, the new protocols recognize the Bitcoin mainnet as the most immutable and reliable part of the virtual space. 🙋

This, in my opinion, won't lead to increased fees for us (that is, for those users who periodically make transactions on the Bitcoin mainnet). However, it is beneficial for miners (which is good news).

Littering the Bitcoin network with images is truly bad... I don't approve of it... However, when a protocol writes the root state or timestamp to the Bitcoin network, I don't consider it spam. It's the creation of a new, powerful financial ecosystem in which Bitcoin is the core. In my view, this isn't a situation where a parasite is parasitizing its prey.

[Wind_FURY]

But regarding the new "sub-83 bytes spam wave": Is there perhaps a new popular protocol emerging? Or is the Runes fad returning?

For runes, i don't see significant price or trading volume changes according to https://coinmarketcap.com/view/runes/. But https://www.oklink.com/bitcoin/runes-tx-list show some Runes activity. I just opened it and the website claim there are 200+ TX with same date time (04/29/2026, 07:48:54), which probably means 200+ rune TX is in same block.

Runes are DEAD. They're all DEAD, including Ordinals. There might be some users who would start trading them again during the Bull Cycle.

But during the Bear Cycle? - DEAD!

[PepeLapiu]

Runes are DEAD. They're all DEAD, including Ordinals.

Okay! So, explain this than:

https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000000a48fbb20a4b052166d1c721d92ce4768f1b367a98e1d

This is just the last block mined. And over 80% of that block are large inscriptions.

So if they are all dead, why are they filling blocks?

[BlackHatCoiner]

The big pools are running spamware specifically designed to promote more spam on bitcoin. Shit like Slipstream and LibreRelay are explicitly built to promote more spam. I have no love for there spam pools.

I'm curious to understand your perspective. So you think the biggest mining businesses have a motive to promote spam that is not for-profit. Why would they promote it, in your opinion? What is there to gain other than extra money from mining fees?

What core 30 did is effectively define bitcoin as a spam repository. Core 30 made file hosting for free a supported and sanctioned use case of bitcoin.

How does Core 30 made "file hosting" free? The version 30 simply allowed relaying OP_RETURN with max size higher than 83 bytes. You're paying miners to use OP_RETURN, and very much more than the alternative means such as using Segwit that come with discount.

[d5000]

The cryptokoryo charts I've used before to look at the Runes weight are abandoned, so I have created my own Runes query (still WIP, may identify other OP_RETURN transactions too) on dune.com.

See the result:


https://dune.com/queries/7406195/11343900

So there is definitely a rise of Runes transactions in the last months. They're probably benefitting from the low fees.

(I guess there is still an error in the query, as I don't think that 6000 Runes transactions can fit in a block. most blocks have between 2000 and 4000 transactions in it. If somebody has an idea to modify it or knows an alternative chart, post it if you want. - Seems the chart is correct, there are blocks with more than 7000 transactions, most of them being Runes ...)

But again, that has nothing to do with Core 30 - Runes transactions are compliant even with BIP 110.

Edit: It is possible that the Runes surge is related to their schedule to allow tokens with less characters as identifiers. At the start, a token needed to have 13 characters (this is why we saw names like DOG*GO*TO*THE*MOON). Now since block 945000 the new limit are 7 characters. With each of these "chunks" it's possible that we see more Runes again, until 1-character Runes are liberated in 2028 and everybody becomes bored again.

[PepeLapiu]

But again, that has nothing to do with Core 30

I call bullshit on that. The ordinals first appeared, and core basically defended ordinals by rejecting an ordinal filter for dubious reasons. And also claiming that the fees are the filter, knowing full well that ordinals were paying half the fees of monetary users.

The signal was clear, and every spammer heard it: come to bitcoin, we'll make room for you.

And the rest is prologue, runes, stamps, tokems, and all that other shit all jumped in knowing full well core would do nothing against them.

At this point all spam is caused by core's stupidity and ignorance.

Spammers love core. They don't like Knots so much....

If/when spam finally goes away or slow down, we all can agree absolutely none of it will be due to the core/Epstein/blockstream/brink cartel putting up a fight against spam.

Runes transactions are compliant even with BIP 110.

A lot of spam is BIP110 compliant. But BIP110 is just the start.

[Humman001]

Yes, in my opinion, these are probably signs of some L2 protocols. 🙋 Protocols like Babylon, Citrea, BoB, Stacks and others are under suspicion. I think that a deeper investigation is needed to confirm that these protocols are indeed leaving such traces. Maybe it would be a good idea to contact their developers to clarify the matter. However, in my opinion, this is a very positive thing! The network is now becoming more dynamic and active. Miners are earning more from fees (miners should not be underestimated, they are very important for Bitcoin). Everything looks so positive, that it seems like we should open a bottle of champagne and celebrate!

[Wind_FURY]

The cryptokoryo charts I've used before to look at the Runes weight are abandoned, so I have created my own Runes query (still WIP, may identify other OP_RETURN transactions too) on dune.com.

See the result:


https://dune.com/queries/7406195/11343900

So there is definitely a rise of Runes transactions in the last months. They're probably benefitting from the low fees.

(I guess there is still an error in the query, as I don't think that 6000 Runes transactions can fit in a block. most blocks have between 2000 and 4000 transactions in it. If somebody has an idea to modify it or knows an alternative chart, post it if you want. - Seems the chart is correct, there are blocks with more than 7000 transactions, most of them being Runes ...)

But again, that has nothing to do with Core 30 - Runes transactions are compliant even with BIP 110.

Edit: It is possible that the Runes surge is related to their schedule to allow tokens with less characters as identifiers. At the start, a token needed to have 13 characters (this is why we saw names like DOG*GO*TO*THE*MOON). Now since block 945000 the new limit are 7 characters. With each of these "chunks" it's possible that we see more Runes again, until 1-character Runes are liberated in 2028 and everybody becomes bored again.

There's a surge in Runes transactions, but there's no prolonged surge in fees per block? 👀

Is that because of its more efficient, OR is it because those transactions are nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity? It's obviously nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity. And if 7,000 is the current peak, then we could probably say that Runes is still dead, no?

[DaveF]

There's a surge in Runes transactions, but there's no prolonged surge in fees per block? 👀

Is that because of its more efficient, OR is it because those transactions are nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity? It's obviously nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity. And if 7,000 is the current peak, then we could probably say that Runes is still dead, no?

Yeah, pretty dead.
I don't think anyone is doing much with things like Runes at the moment. They are still out there it's not like they are going away but IMO at the moment with everything going on in the world and the spike in energy prices there are a lot of people who went from OK financially to lets see what we can save. So, they are not spending on NFTs, or risking some money on DeFi  or whatever.

-Dave

[d5000]

I've looked at Google Trends to see if there is really a Runes resurge. Fortunately, it seems @WIND_Fury is correct and it is only an effect of the low transaction fees.



Interestingly there was more interest in mid 2025 when there was much less blockchain activity.

Now on to Ordinals:



The recent little peak was in July 2025.

And finally, to get the bigger picture, NFT:



It doesn't seem there is much interest in the topic. Simply there seems to be a "baseline" of remaining interest and those who sit on a Runes/Ordinals bag are trying to capitalize from the low fees.

By the way, I don't think L2s are making up that much of these transactions. L2s generally need only one or a few transactions per block, or even less (not all L2s need onchain activity at each block). Thanks to Core 30 they can use OP_RETURN without bothering nodes with useless UTXO set spam and without having to pay miners or use LibreRelay

[PepeLapiu]

Thanks to Core 30 they can use OP_RETURN without bothering nodes with useless UTXO set spam

And this is where we are all sitting in a circle jerk and pretending dropping a spam filter was a good thing. Where we pretend anyone is actually using it.

without having to pay miners or use LibreRelay

That's right. Instead of fighting spam, core just opted to make the entire network accessible to spammers.
Just fucking brilliant! (not)

That's like posting a speed limit. Than you find out people with sports cars don't obey the speed limit. So you remove the posted limit and you give everyone a sports car.

That's how retarded coretards are.

[Wind_FURY]

There's a surge in Runes transactions, but there's no prolonged surge in fees per block? 👀

Is that because of its more efficient, OR is it because those transactions are nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity? It's obviously nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity. And if 7,000 is the current peak, then we could probably say that Runes is still dead, no?

Yeah, pretty dead.

I don't think anyone is doing much with things like Runes at the moment. They are still out there it's not like they are going away but IMO at the moment with everything going on in the world and the spike in energy prices there are a lot of people who went from OK financially to lets see what we can save. So, they are not spending on NFTs, or risking some money on DeFi  or whatever.

-Dave

It's simply - The Bear Market.

 

But those Dick-pics/fart-sound lovers will be back during the Bull Cycle to annoy the filterbois again, with those transactions that the filterbois do not like.

[purple_sparkles]

There's a surge in Runes transactions, but there's no prolonged surge in fees per block? 👀

Is that because of its more efficient, OR is it because those transactions are nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity? It's obviously nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity. And if 7,000 is the current peak, then we could probably say that Runes is still dead, no?

Yeah, pretty dead.

I don't think anyone is doing much with things like Runes at the moment. They are still out there it's not like they are going away but IMO at the moment with everything going on in the world and the spike in energy prices there are a lot of people who went from OK financially to lets see what we can save. So, they are not spending on NFTs, or risking some money on DeFi  or whatever.

-Dave

It's simply - The Bear Market.

 

But those Dick-pics/fart-sound lovers will be back during the Bull Cycle to annoy the filterbois again, with those transactions that the filterbois do not like.

It’s quite possible that during a bear market cycle, many projects and services will stall, and that’s not the worst outcome. In times like these, taking risks is not the best choice, as many projects may simply fail to withstand the bear market, even if they initially had many plans and ambitions.

[PepeLapiu]

Over 40% of the UTXO set are spam dust.
85% of Taproot outputs are spam dust.
Over 50% of current blocks are pure spam.
Big pools are running spamware like LibreRelay and SlipStream literally designed to push more spam on bitcoin.
Last bitcoin conference I went to, I was disgusted to find shitcoiners and wizards pushing their scams on stage and in booths all over the place.
Instead of doing anything about it, the core/blockstream/Epstein class are gasligting us with stupid claims like "filters are censorship", "the fees are the only filter acceptable", and " blowing up spam filters wikk result in less spam".

And you are concerned with large op_return only? You actually ever though any spammers would ever move from Segwit spam or fake pubkey spam to move to op_return?




Question for all of you:

Core said they had to blow up the op_return spam filter to help decentralize mining, help with fee estimation, and help with the UTXO set bloat.

That turned out to be widely controversial. And it didn't achieve any of the claimed goals.

No spammers are moving from fake pubkeys or Segwit ordinals, to large op_return. All that this has achieved is a lost in confidence in core, mass migration away from core, and they triggered a contentious soft fork. But none of their stated goals have been achieved or even nudged in that direction.

My question is:
Doesn't it concern you that core is making absolutely no attempt in reverting to the old op_return limit?

[d5000]

There will be probably no major effect (switch from Taproot to OP_RETURN) if no new protocols show up and if no new NFT or memetoken craze begins.

As shown in the posts above, both the Rune and the Ordinals transactions are bagholders trying to cut their losses. There is no renewed interest in any of both protocols. This also explains why we only see a major share of Runes/Ordinals transactions when the fees are very low.

The Ordinals guys themselves wouldn't shoot their feet and change their protocol in a moment when nobody talks about NFTs nor memetokens. There's simply no incentive for that. (The BRC-20 to Runes change was already quite successful. But it occurred in a time when there was more interest in tokens.). NFTs with > 256 bytes are very rare anyway, BRC-20 was always the most significant spam problem.

And for the network traffic optimization (compact blocks) which was the primary goal of the Core 30 change, at least in theory the change should be positive.

Best thing to "fight spam" is actually not to think about meaningless new filters but to encourage the usage of Bitcoin as a currency for payments, so the fees rise above the level where the BRC-20 spammers could make any profit with their worthless tokens. (This means, for now I am not interested in any technical approaches, all methods, even the dust limit increase, have too many drawbacks, and will probably harm those who want to use Bitcoin as Satoshi conceived it: as P2P cash.)

[PepeLapiu]

The following quote is 110% correct:

There will be probably no major effect (switch from Taproot to OP_RETURN) if no new protocols show up and if no new NFT or memetoken craze begins.

You are absolutely correct sir. Core 30 solves absolutely no problem at all. No spammers are going to move from "more harmful" methods of spam to more expensive op_return. We both agree on that.

What core 30 effectively did is create a new spam method waiting for spammers to figure it out. All the while doing absolutely nothing about existing spam.

But why would core do anything about existing spam when they can just refer to it as "use cases we have today" instead of calling it spam?

If spammers already had a dozen buckets to put their spam in, core gave them an 11th bucket and told them: "We don't know how you can use it on top of the existing spam. Figure it out."

As shown in the posts above, both the Rune and the Ordinals transactions are bagholders trying to cut their losses. There is no renewed interest in any of both protocols. This also explains why we only see a major share of Runes/Ordinals transactions when the fees are very low.

Unless we do anything about it, old spam and old scams will just get replaced with new ones. Just waiting for the current wave of spam to go away and pray no others will come along, is just stupid.

If we welcome them, as core did for the last 5 years, more spam and more scams will come along.

If we kick out the existing spam onto the curb and hand their asses to them, new spam and new scams will think twice. Just like Vitalik did.

Best thing to "fight spam" is actually not to think about meaningless new filters but to encourage the usage of Bitcoin as a currency for payments, so the fees rise above the level where the BRC-20 spammers could make any profit with their worthless tokens.

And the stoopit. "Fees are the only filter we need" mantra is coming back again.

Ordinal spam get a 75% discount and most monetary users get a 50% discount. By what magical mechanism will the fees filter out spam when they pay half the price of monetary users?

This means, for now I am not interested in any technical approaches

Yup! Keep doing exactly what core has been doing for the last 5 years and just put your fucking head in the sand.  Say a prayer for bitcoin too, while you're at it, will ya?

Let's all ignore the problem some more, let's all do nothing while SlipStream and LibreRelay are being deployed specifically to make spam easier. And somehow the problem will just go away on it's own.

[d5000]

To see how the Taproot spam is evolving, I've updated my other queries on Dunes which deal with Ordinals. This is roughly the last year:


https://dune.com/queries/2181569/3574142

There seems to have been an increase in mid 2025, but since January 2026 the size of the Taproot inscriptions is declining.

Same for the number of inscriptions:


https://dune.com/queries/7432002/11373069

It's too early to celebrate I think as this can simply also be a bear market effect, but perhaps the NFT and BRC-20 market is so dead that even with the current low fees it isn't anymore profitable to participate in that market.

Also interesting:

Since block 900000, 99.5% of all Inscriptions were smaller than 1 kilobyte. That are mostly the BRC-20 transactions which constitute the big part of the spam problem.



Only for those that don't know: BRC-20 are not images nor videos, that are simple JSON files containing info about a "token".

So the problem with image inscriptions is actually very, very small. It was small since the beginning.

[PepeLapiu]

Best thing to "fight spam" is actually not to think about meaningless new filters

Coretard slop. Keep claiming filters don't work, are meaningless, or that they are censorship. That way you justify core 30 and you encourage core to blow up more filrers.

but to encourage the usage of Bitcoin as a currency for payments, so the fees rise above the level where the BRC-20 spammers could make any profit

This is the typical coretard slop: "The fees are the only filter we need."

This means, for now I am not interested in any technical approaches, all methods, even the dust limit increase, have too many drawbacks, and will probably harm those who want to use Bitcoin as Satoshi conceived it: as P2P cash.)

If you don't take the problem seriously, any drawback becomes unacceptable to you, no matter how small.

The drawbacks of a raised dust limit would be very minimal. It would make spends under the dust limit more complicated, but still possible. And LN would better serve small payments in the long run anayways.

The other drawback would be that any amount of SATs you have that close or under the dust limit would be hard to spend. You'd have to wait until the dust limit gets lowered, or top up your balance with more coin.

Given that on chain is not optimal for small payments and we already have a much better alternative for small payments, those drawbacks are complete reasonable.

My raised dust limit idea would make an exception for a change address that would re-use an input. And you object to that because you think it compromises your privacy.
I promise you, no 3 letter agency will blow up your front door over a <5000 sats re-used address. And that exception was not put for privacy minded ones to use. It's put in for the 35% of wallets that still re-use the same address over and over.

I don't agree with that practice, but this is the world I live in, not the world I chose.

[Wind_FURY]

There's a surge in Runes transactions, but there's no prolonged surge in fees per block? 👀

Is that because of its more efficient, OR is it because those transactions are nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity? It's obviously nowhere close to its 2024 peak activity. And if 7,000 is the current peak, then we could probably say that Runes is still dead, no?

Yeah, pretty dead.

I don't think anyone is doing much with things like Runes at the moment. They are still out there it's not like they are going away but IMO at the moment with everything going on in the world and the spike in energy prices there are a lot of people who went from OK financially to lets see what we can save. So, they are not spending on NFTs, or risking some money on DeFi  or whatever.

-Dave

It's simply - The Bear Market.

 

But those Dick-pics/fart-sound lovers will be back during the Bull Cycle to annoy the filterbois again, with those transactions that the filterbois do not like.

It’s quite possible that during a bear market cycle, many projects and services will stall, and that’s not the worst outcome. In times like these, taking risks is not the best choice, as many projects may simply fail to withstand the bear market, even if they initially had many plans and ambitions.

It's not actually "quite possible", it's currently happening RIGHT NOW. Why? Because the plebs that traded all those Runes shitcoins and Ordinals dick pics/fart sounds have LOST a lot of money.

What's "quite possible" is that the majority of those people will never return to crypto.

[PepeLapiu]

What's "quite possible" is that the majority of those people will never return to crypto.

:eye_roll:

The world is not about to run out of idiots. Not any time soon. A sucker is born every minute.

We are having enough problems separating bitcoin from all the "crypto" scams. Allowing all those scams on bitcoin is no longer something bitcoiners will tolerate.

Over 40% of the UTXO set is spam dust UTXOs.
Over 85% of Taproot UTXOs are dust spam UTXOs.
Over 50% of current block content is spam.
LibreRelay and Slipstream spamware are being used by the majority of large spam pools.

And meanwhile, core is busy ignoring the problem, rejecting spam filters, and going as far as blowing up existing spam filters. All the while renaming spam as "use cases we have today".

Make no mistake, if nothing is done about it, there WILL BE MORE SPAM.