Bitcoin Achieves One Billion Transactions Milestone After 15 Years

The Bitcoin network has recently surpassed one billion transactions, marking a significant milestone 15 years after its inception.

According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, the one billionth transaction was recorded in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5.

Total number of transactions processed on the Bitcoin network. Source: Clark Moody

This milestone comes more than 15 years after Satoshi Nakamoto mined Bitcoin’s first block on January 3, 2009.

On average, around 178,475 transactions have occurred daily on the Bitcoin network over its 5,603 days of existence.

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

— Wicked (@w_s_bitcoin) May 5, 2024

Notably, this figure does not account for transactions on the Lightning Network, a layer 2 solution for Bitcoin primarily used for micropayments.

Data from the Bitcoin exchange River suggests that the Lightning Network processed approximately 6.6 million transactions in August 2023 alone, indicating potentially hundreds of millions of Lightning transactions since its launch in January 2018.

Daily Bitcoin transactions surged around the network’s fourth halving event on April 20, with a peak of 926,000 transactions processed on April 23, driven in part by the launch of the Runes protocol at block 840,000.

Despite this, daily transaction volumes have since subsided, totaling 660,260 on May 4.

While Bitcoin is the oldest cryptocurrency network, it is not the first to reach the one billion transaction milestone; Ethereum, its main competitor, has processed over 2 billion transactions since its launch in July 2015, according to Etherscan data.

Bitcoin’s current price stands at $63,750, up more than 12% from its recent low of $56,800 on May 2, as reported by CoinGecko. However, it remains down 13.6% from its all-time high of $73,740 reached on March 13.