The Bitcoin network has reached a significant milestone by processing its one billionth transaction, 15 years after its inception.

Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard indicates that transaction number 1,000,000,000 was processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5.

This achievement comes 15 years, four months, and four days after Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the network’s first block on January 3, 2009.

Throughout its 5,603-day history, the network has averaged 178,475 daily transactions.

However, this count does not include transactions made on the Lightning Network, a layer-2 Bitcoin payment protocol designed for faster transactions.

Data from the Bitcoin-only exchange River revealed that the Lightning Network processed at least 6.6 million transactions in August 2023 alone, implying that hundreds of millions of transactions have occurred on Lightning since its launch in January 2018.

Daily transactions on the Bitcoin network surged around the time of its fourth halving event on April 20, reaching a record high of 926,000 transactions on April 23, driven largely by the introduction of the Runes protocol at block 840,000.

Since then, Bitcoin’s daily transaction count has decreased to 660,260 as of May 4.

Despite being the oldest cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin is not the first to process one billion transactions.

Ethereum, Bitcoin’s largest competitor, has processed over two billion transactions since its launch in July 2015, according to Etherscan data.

Bitcoin’s current price is $63,750, reflecting an increase of over 12% since it hit a two-month low of $56,800 on May 2, based on CoinGecko data.

However, it remains down 13.6% from its all-time high of $73,740 set on March 13.

Sources:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-reaches-one-billion-transactions

https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/

https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000001db6de4f4995bdbfbbeba598f4913154b85c5c3520103

https://twitter.com/w_s_bitcoin/status/1787240456197222632

https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin