Bitcoin has processed its 1 billionth transaction – marking a significant milestone in nearly 15 years since its inception. According to Bitcoin transaction tracker Clark Moody, the 1,000,000,000th transaction has been confirmed, with block 842,241 mined at 9:34pm UTC on May 5.
This comes 15 years, four months and four days after Bitcoin (BTC) creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined the network’s genesis block on January 3, 2009.
This means that an average of 178,475 Bitcoin transactions have been processed each day over its 5,603-day existence. However, the number of transactions does not include those made on the Lightning Network, a second-layer Bitcoin network focused primarily on micropayments.
Data from Bitcoin exchange River show that the Lightning Network processed an estimated conservative 6.6 million transactions in August 2023 alone – suggesting that many hundreds of millions of transactions have been made on Lightning since its launch in January 2018.
Daily transactions on Bitcoin have spiked around the network’s fourth halving event on April 20, including a record high of 926,000 processed on April 23.
While Bitcoin is the oldest cryptocurrency network, it is not the first to process a billion transactions. Data from Etherscan shows that Bitcoin’s biggest rival, Ethereum, has processed more than 2 billion transactions since its launch in July 2015.
Ethereum is now the world’s second-most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. If Bitcoin pioneered blockchain technology as the first cryptocurrency, Ethereum has taken the decentralised digital currency concept and run with it – building a global network that underpins a connected marketplace of decentralised applications (dApps) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Bitcoin is currently trading at US$63,750, up more than 12% since hitting a two-month low of US$56,800 on May 2, according to CoinGecko. However, it remains down 13.6% from its all-time high of US$73,740 set on March 13. Over the past decade, Bitcoin’s price has increased by 12,000%.
Bitcoin’s market share of the cryptocurrency market has recently climbed to a three-year high of 57%. This dominance suggests that Bitcoin could continue to outperform alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) in the months ahead. According to Coinpriceforecast, Bitcoin’s price is predicted to reach US$275,000 by mid-2030, and could even hit US$293,000 by the end of the decade.
Since Bitcoin was first introduced to the public in 2009, it has experienced a total of four halvings – with the first occurring on November 28, 2012.
Most recently, the halving took place at block 840,000. While the block reward was cut in half from 6.25 Bitcoin to 3.125 Bitcoin, block 840,000 still saw miners collect more than 37 Bitcoin in transaction fees – worth more than US$2.4 million.
