Bitcoin hits milestone of one billion transactions

The Bitcoin network has achieved a significant milestone by processing its one billionth transaction, marking a momentous occasion for the network 15 years after its inception.
According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, transaction number 1,000,000,000 was successfully processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5.
This achievement comes 15 years, four months, and four days after the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009.
Throughout its 5,603-day existence, the network has handled an average of 178,475 daily transactions.
It’s worth noting that this count does not include transactions conducted on the Lightning Network, a layer-2 payment protocol for Bitcoin that enables faster transactions.
Data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River reveals that the Lightning Network alone processed an estimated minimum of 6.6 million transactions in August 2023, suggesting that hundreds of millions of transactions have taken place on Lightning since its launch in January 2018.
The number of daily transactions on Bitcoin saw a significant increase during the network’s fourth halving event on April 20, reaching a record high of 926,000 transactions on April 23.
Much of this surge in demand was driven by the launch of the Runes protocol at block 840,000.
However, the daily transaction count for Bitcoin has since declined to 660,260 on May 4.
Despite being the oldest cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin is not the first to process one billion transactions.
Its main rival, Ethereum, has processed well over two billion transactions since its launch in July 2015, according to Etherscan data.
As of now, Bitcoin is priced at $63,750, experiencing a 12% increase since reaching 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 reached on March 13.