Bitcoin has surpassed one billion transactions for the first time since its creation in 2009.
According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, this landmark achievement occurred on May 5 at block 842,241. As of May 7, the total number of transactions registered was 1,000,701,505.
The pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin block on January 3, 2009. Over its 5,603 days, the network has processed an average of 178,475 transactions daily. This calculation does not include transactions via the Lightning Network, a secondary layer that speeds up transactions.
This milestone comes shortly after Bitcoin’s fourth halving event on April 20. Following this, on April 23, the network saw a record 926,000 transactions daily. This surge coincided with the introduction of the Runes protocol, developed by Casey Rodarmor, also known as the Ordinals protocol, which supports Bitcoin-based NFTs.
Bitcoin, the most established and highest-valued cryptocurrency, was at $63,582 on international exchanges such as CoinMarketCap at the time of the milestone. The total market cap of Bitcoin is currently $1.25 trillion, with 19,695,050 of the maximum 21 million tokens already in circulation. The cryptocurrency’s latest peak price was $73,790 on March 14.
In response to this development, Nischal Shetty, Founder and CEO of Indian crypto exchange WazirX, expressed his enthusiasm on X (formerly Twitter), highlighting the significance of this milestone for advancing the Web3 ecosystem. He noted Bitcoin’s value as an asset and its limited transaction capacity and is looking forward to more substantial transaction volumes in the future.