Alkanes, a Bitcoin metaprotocol similar to Ordinals, accounted for the majority of Bitcoin transactions over a 90-day stretch ending in September, according to figures published by SUBFROST, the company that 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 — OP_RETURN being Bitcoin's built-in output type for attaching arbitrary, unspendable data — and 13.4% of transaction-fee revenue. Those weight and fee shares sit well below Alkanes' 61.1% share of transactions, meaning the average Alkanes transaction carried less weight and paid less in fees than the network average.

Alkanes builds on top of the Runes protocol and is maintained by SUBFROST, a U.S.-facing company led by co-founder Gabe Lee, alongside 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 that the West is largely unaware of.

SUBFROST ships full Chinese documentation and a Chinese-language metrics page, and runs an official Chinese-language Telegram group for DIESEL. In 2025, Chinese outlets noted that most Alkanes discussion on X came from Chinese-speaking users, many of whom mentioned 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 on-chain traffic figures come 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 counts 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. 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, as it put it.

Alkanes does not change Bitcoin consensus and does not run as a sidechain. Contract code is written in WebAssembly and deployed once in witness data; later, users send function calls inside a Runes-format runestone. A separate indexer, Metashrew, executes those calls. Full Bitcoin nodes confirm the transactions but do not validate Alkanes balances. That indexer-dependent model is the norm for Bitcoin metaprotocols: Ordinals and Runes balances are likewise tracked by indexers rather than by consensus.

That wrapper design is why the same activity was attributed to 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.

Separately, Renaud Cuny, who writes Bitcoin Block Space Weekly and tracks BIP-110, 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 article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Juan Galt.