Bitcoin reaches new milestone, processes 1 billion transactions

The Bitcoin network has reached a new milestone: one billion transactions processed, 15 years, four months and four days after its genesis block was mined.

According to data from Clark Moody’s Bitcoin Dashboard, the billionth transaction was mined at block 842,241 on May 5 at 21:34 UTC.

Bitcoin processes billions of transactions

Bitcoin’s latest milestone comes less than three weeks after the network completed its fourth halving, which reduced miners’ block rewards from 6.25 bitcoins to 3.125 BTC. The halving occurred on April 19, when the total number of Bitcoin transactions reached around 990.64 million.

The network has witnessed a significant increase in daily transactions over the past month, with the launch of new protocols such as Ordinals, Runes and the BRC-20 token standard.

The launch of Ordinals led to non-fungible Bitcoin tokens (NFTs) which fueled user activity on the network. At the time of writing, data from market analytics platform Dune showed that roughly $432 million had been spent in transaction fees on more than 66.4 million signups, which indicates that market participants have been busy on the Bitcoin network.

On the other hand, Runes was launched on Bitcoin Halving Day, especially on the halving block. The protocol extends the functionality of Bitcoin by allowing the creation of fungible tokens, as Ethereum does. Halfway through the weekend, Runes transactions accounted for over 50% of all Bitcoin transactions, surpassing Ordinals and dominating the network.

In addition, the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States and Hong Kong has also contributed to the increase in Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin ETF market currently has a market cap of $53.41 billion and assets under management totaling $52.68 billion.

Not the First

Although it took Bitcoin about 15 years to process one billion transactions, the network count is likely to reach two billion in a shorter period of time as BTC gains more adoption and users come on-chain of blocks

It is worth noting that Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to reach 1,000,000,000 transactions. Ethereum did this a few years ago and has processed over 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in 2015.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s billion transaction count does not include those executed on the Lightning Network’s Layer 2 protocol, launched in 2018.

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