Bitcoin reaches one billion transactions

The Bitcoin network has processed its one billionth transaction — marking a huge milestone moment for the network 15 years after its creation.

Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard shows  that transaction 1,000,000,000 had been reached, which was mined into block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5, other data shows.

It comes 15 years, four months and four days after Bitcoin  (BTC)  pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on Jan. 3, 2009.

It means an average of 178,475 daily transactions have been made on Bitcoin in its 5,603 day existence.

#Bitcoin has officially processed over 1 billion transactions. pic.twitter.com/kS704YYoW5

— Wicked (@w_s_bitcoin) May 5, 2024

However, the transaction count doesn't include those made on the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer 2 network primarily focused on micropayments.

Data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River found the Lightning Network processed a lower-bound estimate of 6.6 million transactions alone in August, 2023 — which could suggest that hundreds of millions of transactions have been made on Lightning since it launched in January, 2018.

Daily transactions on Bitcoin spiked around the network’s fourth halving event on April 20, including a record high 926,000 transactions processed on April 23.

Much of this demand came from the launch of the Runes protocol — a new Bitcoin token standard — at block 840,000.

That said, Bitcoin’s daily transaction count has since cooled off to 660,260 on May 4.

Despite Bitcoin being the oldest cryptocurrency network, it isn’t the first of its kind to process one billion transactions.

Bitcoin's biggest rival, Ethereum, has processed well over 2 billion transactions since it launched in July 2015, Etherscan data shows.

Related: Impact of Bitcoin halving event on transaction confirmation times

Bitcoin is currently priced at $63,750, up over 12% since it hit a two-month low of $56,800 on May 2, according to CoinGecko.

However, it is still down 13,6% from its all-time high of $73,740 set on March 13.

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