Bitcoin Hits 1 Billion Transactions

Bitcoin surpasses 1 billion transactions, a milestone for the 15-year-old cryptocurrency.

One billion transactions have been processed through the Bitcoin network, signifying a momentous achievement for the organization founded fifteen years ago. 

Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard indicates that at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5, additional data shows that transaction 1,000,000,000 had been completed and encoded into block 842,241.

It occurred fifteen years, four months, and four days after Satoshi Nakamoto, the fictitious originator of Bitcoin (BTC), mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009.

This signifies that Bitcoin has witnessed an average of 178,475 daily transactions throughout its 5,603-day existence.

However, transactions executed on the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer two networks focusing predominantly on micropayments, are not included in the total.

According to data obtained exclusively from the Bitcoin-focused exchange River, the Lightning Network facilitated an estimated minimum of 6.6 million transactions in August 2023. This figure may indicate that hundreds of millions of transactions have transpired on Lightning since its inception in January 2018. 

In the days leading up to the fourth halving of the Bitcoin network on April 20, daily transactions skyrocketed, peaking at a staggering 926,000 transactions on April 23. 

The introduction of the Runes protocol, a new Bitcoin token standard, in the 840,000th block, generated a significant portion of this demand. However, since May 4, Bitcoin’s daily transaction volume has decreased to 660,260. 

Although Bitcoin is the earliest cryptocurrency network, it has already processed one billion transactions. According to Etherscan data, Ethereum, Bitcoin’s primary competitor, has facilitated more than 2 billion transactions since its inception in July 2015.

Bitcoin is currently valued at $63,750, according to CoinGecko, an increase of over 12% since its two-month nadir of $56,800 on May 2. Nevertheless, it has declined by 13.6% since its peak of $73,740 was established on March 13.