The Bitcoin network successfully processed its one billionth transaction today, achieving a major milestone and marking a significant moment in the cryptocurrency’s roughly 15-year history.
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This milestone was reached on May 5, 2023 at 9:34 PM UTC, when transaction 1,000,000,000 was mined into block 842,241.
The milestone comes 15 years, four months, and four days after Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009. Over the course of its 5,603-day existence, Bitcoin has processed an average of 178,475 block transactions per day.
But it’s worth noting that this transaction count does not include transactions conducted on Bitcoin’s second-layer network, the Lightning Network.
The milestone comes at an exciting time for Bitcoin, which has seen increasing levels of daily transactions over the past year as novel protocols such as Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes have attracted more activity to the world’s first blockchain. The launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF has also bolstered bullish sentiment for the coin.
On April 20, during the Bitcoin network’s fourth halving event, daily Bitcoin transactions surged, with an all-time high of 926,000 transactions processed on April 23. Much of this demand can be attributed to the launch of the blockchain’s new Bitcoin token standard, the Runes protocol. Since May 4, however, Bitcoin’s daily transaction volume has fallen to 660,260.
However, Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to process more than a billion transactions. For example, Ethereum has processed more than 2 billion transactions despite being launched about six years after Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $63,700, a 12% rebound since hitting a two-month low of $56,800 on May 2. But it is still down 13.6% from its all-time high of $73,740 on March 13 this year.
