The Bitcoin network has reached a significant milestone by processing its one billionth transaction, marking a momentous occasion 15 years after its inception.
According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, transaction number 1,000,000,000 was recorded in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5. This event occurred 15 years, four months, and four days after the network’s first block was mined by the pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, on January 3, 2009.
Throughout its 5,603-day existence, the Bitcoin network has averaged 178,475 daily transactions. However, this count does not include transactions conducted on the Lightning Network, a layer-2 payment protocol designed to facilitate faster transactions.
Data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River indicates that the Lightning Network alone processed an estimated 6.6 million transactions in August 2023. This suggests that hundreds of millions of transactions have occurred on Lightning since its launch in January 2018.
Daily transactions on the Bitcoin network surged around the fourth halving event on April 20, reaching a record high of 926,000 transactions on April 23. This spike in demand was largely attributed to the launch of the Runes protocol at block 840,000. However, the daily transaction count has since decreased to 660,260 on May 4.
While Bitcoin is the oldest cryptocurrency network, it is not the first to process one billion transactions. Ethereum, Bitcoin’s primary rival, has processed well over two billion transactions since its launch in July 2015, according to Etherscan data.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $63,750, representing a more than 12% increase since reaching a two-month low of $56,800 on May 2. However, it remains down 13.6% from its all-time high of $73,740 reached on March 13.
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