Methodology

How a rune sale is found and priced

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Every rune sale on the dashboard is read from a confirmed Bitcoin transaction by our own node, and priced from the bitcoin that actually changed hands.

In one sentence

A rune sale is a confirmed transaction that carries a Runestone, moves runes from one wallet to another, and pays the seller in bitcoin; its price is the bitcoin the seller received.

As of 2026-10-21, 45 runes had at least 5 clean sales each in the last 30 days.

Where the data comes from

Our own Bitcoin Core node. New blocks are read every 10 minutes. The 30 days before the scan first started are read in the background, a few blocks at a time (about 12 hours for the month). No marketplace feed is involved, so a sale counts wherever it happened: on a marketplace, through a liquidity pool, or directly between two wallets.

How a transaction is classified

It must carry a Runestone. The transaction's OP_RETURN output is decoded into its edicts, the instructions that say how many units of which rune go to which output.
Bitcoin must flow the other way. We add up, for each address, the bitcoin it put in and took out. A sale needs a payer and a payee, each past a small threshold, so change outputs and dust don't look like trades.
Coins must come from at least two different addresses. A marketplace sale has inputs from both the seller and the buyer. A wallet moving runes from one address is a transfer, not a sale. This counts input addresses, not signers: one person spending from two of their own addresses passes it.
The rune is traced one hop back to find which address the units came from, which is the seller.

How it is priced

Price is the bitcoin the seller received, in sats.
Price per token is that price divided by the units the buyer received, read from the edicts.
Only sales of a single rune whose amount is stated get a per-token price. A transaction that moves several runes at once, or whose amount can't be read, still counts as a sale, but it has no per-token price.
Per-token prices far from a rune's neighbouring trades are treated as bad data and left out of averages. They are still listed.

Known limits

The classifier was validated by hand against a small set of real sales before being run on everything. It is confident about the core test (bitcoin one way, runes the other, two input addresses) and less so about unusual transaction shapes.
A pool swap and a marketplace sale look the same on-chain. Who was on the other side is worked out separately (see who a trade was with).
Sales that look like one person trading with themselves are kept, labelled and left out of statistics (see wash-trade flags).

A token that also trades on another chain

Some tokens exist on Bitcoin and somewhere else at the same time, usually through a bridge. DOG is the example people ask about: it trades as a rune on Bitcoin and as a bridged token on Solana, and the two prices are rarely identical.

Every price here is the Bitcoin one. A rune's price on this dashboard is bitcoin that moved in a confirmed Bitcoin transaction, so a trade on another chain is not in it, however large that market is.

That is a real difference from the figure on an aggregator. A site like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko publishes one price per token: a volume-weighted average across every venue it tracks, on every chain, converted to one currency. If most of a token's volume is on the other chain, that blended figure mostly describes the other chain, and it can sit some way from what the same token is actually fetching in bitcoin today.

Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions:

What would this fetch if I sold it on Bitcoin right now? Ours, because it is made only of Bitcoin trades.
What is this token worth in the world? The aggregator's, because it includes the venues we cannot see.

So expect a gap on any bridged token, treat the direction of ours as the Bitcoin-side signal, and do not read a difference between the two as either of them being broken.

How to check it yourself

Every sale on the dashboard carries its transaction id. Open it on any block explorer: the inputs, outputs and amounts are there, and the Runestone decodes to the same edicts.

Also as plain Markdown. See every methodology page.

Last updated 2026-10-10