Sensible consolidation of the market or transition to a weaker summer?

Runes protocol activity has dropped significantly since the first week of trading. There was a notable drop in activity on 10 May, with very few new mints and few new wallets interacting with the protocol.
According to the Dune Analytics dashboard, the protocol’s fee revenue has been steadily declining. Although Runes is still earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees daily on the Bitcoin blockchain, total fees have only surpassed the $1 million mark twice in the last 12 days, indicating a downward trend.
Runes is a new Bitcoin token standard that allows users to create fungible tokens on the blockchain and was created by Ordinals inventor Casey Rodarmor. Ordinals enabled non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin.
In the coming weeks, it will become clear whether this is once again just short-term hype or a meaningful expansion of the blockchain offering.

ARK Invest and 21Shares have removed plans for Ethereum staking from their updated application for a spot Ethereum exchange-traded fund (ETF).
The updated application, filed on Friday 10 May, removed the clause stating that 21Shares would stake a portion of the fund’s assets through third-party providers. It previously stated: “The Provider may, from time to time, stake a portion of the Trust’s assets through one or more trusted staking providers.”
In their original application dated 7 February, the companies had included a clause stating that 21Shares expects to receive ETH as a reward for staking and intends to classify the resulting income as income of the fund.
However, in the now amended application, the relevant section is deleted, but all other planned mechanisms are retained, including losses due to penalty cuts, temporarily inaccessible funds during staking and unstaking, and potential impact on the price of Ethereum.
According to Eric Balchunas, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, the update may be an attempt to refine the application as a proactive response to potential feedback from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), although no official feedback has yet been received.
The SEC has been slightly cautious, if at all, about the Ether ETFs.

Some Bitcoin traders are pointing to a real “hammer” in BTC’s weekly chart that could herald the beginning of the end of last month’s downtrend.
“The Bitcoin price still looks like it could jump higher soon,” as Jan Happel and Yann Allemann, founders of the crypto analysis service Glassnode, noted on 9 May.
They noted that the Bitcoin price chart closed on May 5 with a bullish hammer – the name given when there is a small body above a thin long line, referred to as a “wick.”
They point out that Bitcoin formed a “bullish hammer” on 5 May, which is indicated in the price chart by a small candle with a long thin “wick”.
“Bitcoin has formed a bullish hammer in the weekly chart…the trend reversal is imminent”, as other traders have also stated.
The supposed trend reversal can be inferred from the fact that although traders have exerted high pressure on the Bitcoin price over the last seven days, it was still able to close almost back at the opening price because sentiment seems to be turning with regard to demand.
“This week’s downturn seems like a healthy correction before it goes up again. Corrections often amount to 50% or 61.8% of the previous price movement,” as the Glassnode experts explain.