The Bitcoin blockchain has achieved a new milestone: one billion processed transactions, 15 years, four months, and four days after mining the first block. According to data on Clark Moody’s bitcoin dashboard, the milestone transaction was mined in block 842,241 on May 5 at 21:34 UTC.
The latest milestone for Bitcoin comes less than three weeks after the blockchain completed its fourth halving, which cut miner rewards per block from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoins. The halving occurred on April 20, when the total number of Bitcoin transactions was around 990.64 million.
The blockchain has witnessed a significant increase in daily transactions over the past month, with the launch of new protocols such as Ordinals, Runes, and the BRC-20 token standard. The launch of Ordinals enabled the ownership of NFTs on Bitcoin, which spurred user activity on the network. At the time of writing, data from the market analysis platform Dune showed that approximately $432 million was spent as transaction fees on over 66.4 million entries, indicating that market participants were busy.
On the other hand, Runes was launched on the day of the halving, specifically on that particular block. The protocol expands Bitcoin’s functionality by allowing the creation of fungible tokens, similar to Ethereum. During the halving week, Runes transactions accounted for more than 50 percent of total Bitcoin transactions, surpassing Ordinals.
Additionally, the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US and Hong Kong has also contributed to the increase in Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin ETF market currently has a market capitalization of $53.41 billion and assets under management totaling $52.68 billion.
While it took Bitcoin about 15 years to process one billion transactions, the number is likely to reach two billion in a shorter timeframe as Bitcoin becomes increasingly accepted.
It is worth noting that Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to achieve 1,000,000,000 transactions. Ethereum did so a few years ago and has processed over 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in 2015. Meanwhile, the billion Bitcoin transactions do not include those executed on the Lightning Network, launched in 2018.
