Bitcoin reaches milestone of 1 billion transactions

The Bitcoin blockchain has managed to process 1 billion transactions 15 years after its launch. This brings the digital currency to an average of 178,475 transactions per day in the 5,603 days it has now existed.

According to Clark Moody’s dashboard, this milestone was reached with block 842.241.

15 years, 4 months and 4 days

To be precise, this milestone was reached 15 years, 4 months and 4 days after Satoshi Nakamoto launched the blockchain.

#Bitcoin has officially processed over 1 billion transactions. pic.twitter.com/kS704YYoW5

— Wicked (@w_s_bitcoin) May 5, 2024

The creator of Bitcoin probably would not have dreamed that his creation would still be so popular 15 years later. What perhaps makes the story even more special is that Satoshi has not been heard from since 2011.

He left the project very early and no one really knows how he/her/them is doing now. The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is still unknown and there is a chance that the creator of Bitcoin is no longer with us.

However, there is a chance that someone walks the earth anonymously as the creator of the most successful financial asset of the past 15 years. The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto is perhaps the biggest internet mystery in history.

The Lightning Network does not count

Naturally, transactions on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network do not count towards reaching this milestone. For example, River estimates that Bitcoin processed 6.3 million transactions on the Lightning Network alone in August 2023.

This suggests that together perhaps more than 100 million transactions took place on Lightning, the network that has existed since January 2018.

The number of daily transactions on Bitcoin itself skyrocketed around the quadrennial halving. On April 23, a record number of 926,000 transactions were processed on the bitcoin blockchain.

Many of these transactions were in the name of the new Runes Protocol, a new token standard that was launched on Bitcoin with the halving. Since then, the daily number of transactions has cooled to around 660,000 per day.