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 was processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5.
It comes 15 years, four months and four days after the pseudonymous creator Bitcoin (BTC), Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on Jan. 3, 2009.
The network has processed an average of 178,475 daily transactions 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 count doesn’t include transactions made on the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer-2 payment protocol enabling faster transactions.
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, suggesting 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, with a record high of 926,000 transactions processed on April 23.
Much of this demand came from the launch of the Runes protocol 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 two 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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