Bitcoin has reached a new milestone, making one billion transactions

The Bitcoin network has reached a new milestone: one billion processed transactions, 15 years, four months, and four days after the Genesis block was mined.

According to data on Clark Moody's Bitcoin Dashboard, the one billionth transaction was recorded at block 842,241 on May 5 at 9:34 PM UTC.

Bitcoin process one billion transactions

Bitcoin's latest incident comes less than three weeks after the network completed its fourth halving, which saw miners' rewards cut from 6.25 bitcoins to 3.125 BTC. The halving happened on April 19, when Bitcoin's total transaction count hovered around 990.64 million.

The network has seen a significant increase in daily transactions over the past month, with the launch of new protocols such as Ordinary, Runes and the BRC-20 token standard.

The launch of Ordinals brought Bitcoin non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that drive user activity on the network. At the time of writing, data from market analytics platform Dune shows that nearly $432 million in transaction fees have been spent on more than 66.4 million articles, indicating that market participants are engaged on the Bitcoin network.

On the other hand, Runes started on Bitcoin's heyday, especially on the half-block. The protocol extends the functionality of Bitcoin by allowing the creation of fungibles like Ethereum. Halfway through the weekend, Runes transactions accounted for more than 50% of all Bitcoin transactions, surpassing normal and dominating the network.

Additionally, the launch of Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) in the United States and Hong Kong contributed to the increase in Bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin ETF market currently has a market cap of $53.41 billion and assets under management total $52.68 billion.

Not the first

While it took Bitcoin 15 years to process one billion transactions, as BTC gains more adoption and users flock to the blockchain, the network's size could hit two billion in no time.

It should be noted that Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to hit 1,000,000,000 transactions. Ethereum did this a few years ago and has done more than 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in 2015.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin's one billion transaction count in 2018 It does not include those implemented on the network's Layer-2 protocol, the Lightning Network, which launched in 2018.