The halving is expected in roughly nine hours, but it's not just that making today a big day for the orange coin — Runes, the new token standard for Bitcoin, is scheduled to release alongside it.

Why it matters: This remains the year of Bitcoin, and Runes is likely to extend that narrative, Brady writes.

Catch up quick: To understand Runes' significance in the Bitcoin ecosystem, we first have to look at Ordinals.

• Runes is the creation of Casey Rodarmor, a Bitcoin-devoted developer, who previously came up with a way to run NFTs on Bitcoin.

That earlier idea was Ordinals, and they have two interesting features:

• They store the NFT artwork on the actual Bitcoin blockchain. Very few NFTs you have heard of do this, but Ordinals do. It forces them to use pretty low-resolution imagery in general, but users kind of like that.
• It works by linking data to a specific fraction of a bitcoin, a satoshi (one one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin). This allows for interesting properties, such as creating an Ordinal off a satoshi from the block reward following today's halving.
• Then the Ordinals protocol was used by others to create tokens on Bitcoin. These are known as BRC-20 tokens.

Ordinals have had a big impact on the Bitcoin network. Fee spend on Ordinals has reached a cumulative $258 million.

• That's earnings to miners that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Never mind how it's driven up fees for normal transactions.
• $183 million of that total spend on inscriptions has been on BRC-20 tokens.

And that brings us to Runes. BRC-20s have been found to be inefficient and complicated.

• Runes will be a more efficient method to achieve the same end.

💭 Brady's thought bubble: I will eat my hat if Runes doesn't drive a speculative frenzy.

The latest: Taproot Wizards, one of the pioneering collections, is already talking about its Rune offering in its Discord channel.

• Plus, there's already infrastructure. RunesDEX announced raising $2 million to build an automated market maker for trading Runes (think, Uniswap-for-Bitcoin).

The intrigue: Even now, the narrative of NFTs being dead is much less true when Bitcoin gets factored in.

• NodeMonkes, the apex Bitcoin NFT project, have a floor price of 0.44 BTC (around $27,000). It has briefly flipped Bored Apes Yacht Club in market cap.

What we're watching: Block rewards for miners are going to drop in half today — that's certain. Provided demand to use Bitcoin stays the same, fees are going to become a greater portion of miners' revenue.

• If Runes is as popular as folks expect, fee revenue could make up a much larger portion of miner revenue.

Looked at one way, each halving is less and less significant. That is, if you look at it in terms of bitcoin (BTC), Brady writes.

• A block reward reduction of 25 BTC is a lot bigger than a reduction of 3.125 BTC, like it's going to drop today.

Yes, but: In dollar terms (which is what miners pay salaries and utility bills with), the reduction has been greater by an order of magnitude with every block reward reduction.

• In dollar terms, this halving is by far the most impactful to date.

By the numbers: For the dollar value of the next halving, sometime in 2028, to be reduced by more than a million dollars (continuing the trend of an order of magnitude increase), bitcoin would have to be trading for at least $640,000.

A jury found Avraham "Avi" Eisenberg guilty on all three counts of fraud and manipulation yesterday in a $110 million crypto trade scheme using the Mango Markets platform, Crystal writes.

Why it matters: The case was the first known test for a jury to decide whether U.S. laws governing fraud and market manipulation apply to decentralized finance (DeFi).

Between the lines: The 28-year-old Eisenberg will be held to account for his actions on Oct. 11, 2022, when a series of trades he made intentionally boosted the price of Mango Markets' native token, MNGO, as well as the price of futures contracts.

• He used the inflated futures holdings as collateral to borrow other cryptocurrencies on the platform, then quickly withdrew those assets and walked away from his collateral.
• Eisenberg never disputed the facts of the strategy but contended that what he did was legal and permitted by the DeFi protocol, a principle in the industry known as "code is law."

The big picture: U.S. laws apply to DeFi.

What we're watching: Eisenberg is set to be sentenced on July 29; he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

🎮 Yuga Labs has offloaded the game it made, HV-MTL, and burned a bunch of its NFTs. (Decrypt)

🕹 NFT-enabled game Nyan Heroes did very well in the Epic Games store during its preview. (The Block)

😋 Demand for bitcoin ETFs has slowed ahead of the halving. (Blockworks)

Tether has announced that tether (USDT) will be minted on The Open Network, which runs toncoin (TON), Brady writes.

• Toncoin was up 18% as of 9am ET today on the news, the biggest 24-hour gain of any coin in the top 50.

How it works: Tether issues USDT on lots of chains, and The Open Network is the latest.

By the numbers: According to Tether's transparency page, $10 million has been authorized on TON, but only $3 million has been issued.

The intrigue: TON has been integrated with Telegram, the messaging app that's pushing a billion users.

• TON is built on technology that originated within Telegram, but that the company later open-sourced. It claims to be independent of the company.