A Blockspace Markets Protocol

Alkimiya facilitates the creation, trading, and settlement of synthetic blockspace resources such as BTC feerate. Users can capitalize on the impacts of on-chain activities by going long or short on BTC network tx fees.

In mid-April 2024, following the Bitcoin Halving, the rush by several Ordinals and Runes projects to mint their collections caused the network feerate to spike from 70 sat/vB to over 1,300 sat/vB.

In June 2024, a bug in OKX’s UTXO consolidation script led to fees skyrocketing from 60 sat/vB to over 900 sat/vB in a single day, resulting in approximately $18 million in losses for OKX due to transaction fees.

In August 2024, the launch of Babylon’s Bitcoin Staking Program - Phase 1 caused a 90x spike in BTC transaction fees, jumping from approximately 8 sat/vB to 717 sat/vB within a single block. Successful stakers spent a total of 53.405 BTC ($3.4m) in fees while unsuccessful stakers spent an additional 4.723 BTC ($0.35m) to unbond their transactions.

Previously, service providers had no protection against such wild fee swings, merely paying these fees as they processed transactions.

Alkimiya allows them to hedge against these costs by buying future Tx Fees.