The extremely elevated fees in the halving block are a result of competition to be the "first" Rune, not to snipe or discourage sniping names.

With so many new tokens appearing simultaneously, it was assumed that the ones at the top of the list will form a Schelling point for speculators and pump the hardest.

This isn't how it works.

Runes have built-in anti-name-sniping protection: the "etching" transaction has to include an inscription commitment with 6 confirmations, so by the time the name is revealed in the mempool it's too late to make a copycat.

👍

Yeah, Bitfeed is running a 300MB mempool with an unusually short mempoolexpiry.

I'll fix it eventually.