Bitcoin (BTC) reaches one billion transactions

Bitcoin has seen an average of 178,475 daily transactions over its 5,603-day lifespan. The Bitcoin network has conducted its one billionth transaction, marking an important milestone for the network 15 years after its inception. According to other data, Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard shows that transaction 1,000,000,000 was mined into block 842,241 at 9:34 p.m. UTC on May 5.

It comes 15 years, four months, and four days after Bitcoin (BTC) founder Satoshi Nakamoto mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009. It means that Bitcoin has seen an average of 178,475 daily transactions over its 5,603-day lifespan.

However, the transaction count excludes those performed on the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer 2 network primarily focused on micropayments.

According to data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River, the Lightning Network processed a lower-bound estimate of 6.6 million transactions alone in August 2023, implying that hundreds of millions of transactions have occurred since Lightning’s inception in January 2018. Daily Bitcoin transactions increased during the network’s fourth halving event on April 20, with a record high of 926,000 transactions completed on April 23. Much of this demand stemmed from announcing the Runes protocol, a new Bitcoin token standard, at block 840,000.

However, as of May 4, Bitcoin’s daily transaction count had dropped to 660,260. Bitcoin is the oldest cryptocurrency network, but it is not the first to conduct one billion transactions. Ethereum, Bitcoin’s main competitor, has processed more than 2 billion transactions since its inception in July 2015, according to Etherscan data. 

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