Bitcoin hits massive milestone: One billion transactions processed

Marking an incredible milestone in the history of the world’s first and most valuable cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin network has processed its 1 billionth transaction. That milestone moment came 15 years, four months, and four days after its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009.

Bitcoin growth and adoption 

Ever since the Bitcoin network was released 5,603 days ago, it never ceased its stride, churning out an average of 178,475 transactions every day. It is important to remember that this figure does not include the number of transactions routed through the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin layer-2 payment protocol designed to facilitate faster transactions.

Again, figures from the Bitcoin-only exchange River suggest this is a lower bound estimate—that the Lightning Network cleared 6.6 million transactions in August 2023 alone. This means that since launching in January 2018, hundreds of millions of transactions should have taken place within the Lightning Network.

Around the fourth halving event of the network, transactions had a daily all-time high of 926,000 transactions on April 23. This launch at block 840,000 brought demand for the Runes protocol.

Market performance

The Clark Moody Bitcoin dashboard claimed that more than 660,260 transactions were recorded on the blockchain in one single day, a number of new records. The same source also reports that transaction 1,000,000,000 got into block 842,241 at 9:34 p.m. UTC on May 5.

Source: Clark Moody

Even though the Bitcoin network is the oldest in the history of cryptocurrencies, it is not the first to process a billion transactions. Its biggest rival, Ethereum, has processed well over two billion transactions since July 2015, according to Etherscan data.

As of the time of this writing, Bitcoin exchanges hands near $63,750, up by more than 12% from the two-month low at around $56,800 on May 2, as tracked by CoinGecko. It still remains to be over 13.6% down from the all-time high set at $73,740 on March 13.

Source: CoinGecko

It’s remarkable that such a large number of transactions are processed within the Bitcoin network, which speaks to its strength and acceptance. The ecosystem of cryptocurrencies will only continue to grow from here, making it really interesting to see how Bitcoin, along with other digital assets, adapts to shaping the future of finance.