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.