Historic Milestone: The Bitcoin Network Has Now Processed Over 1 Billion Transactions

The Bitcoin network recently reached a huge milestone with its one billionth recorded transaction.

One ₿illion Transactions

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) May 5, 2024

According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, transaction 1,000,000,000 was processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5. This comes 15 years, four months, and four days after the mythical creator of Bitcoin (BTC), Satoshi Nakamoto, mined the Genesis block on Jan. 3, 2009.

The very first BTC transaction happened on Jan. 12, 2009, between Satoshi and the late American software developer and early Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney. Satoshi sent Finney 10 coins as a test. Moments later, Finney had an email correspondence with the pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor to report some bugs.  

Finney later walked away from Bitcoin and was surprised to find out the flagship crypto indeed had monetary value after he came back in late 2010. The BTC network reached one million transactions in July 2011. At the time, the OG crypto was trading for approximately $15.   

In its 5,603 days of existence, the Bitcoin network has processed roughly 178,475 daily transactions. However, this figure doesn’t include transactions conducted on the Layer-2 Lightning Network.

Data from the Bitcoin-focused exchange River reveals that the Lightning Network processed at least 6.5 million transactions in August 2023, indicating that hundreds of millions of transactions have been done on Lightning since it went live in early 2018.

Ethereum Hit The $1 Billion Transaction Milestone First

Bitcoin’s daily transactions surged during the once-every-four-years rewards halving event on April 20. A historic high of 925,000 transactions was processed on April 23. Most of this demand stemmed from the fast uptake of Casey Rodarmor’s new Runes protocol. However, the initial fee bonanza has waned, with BTC’s daily transaction count falling to 660,260 as of May 4.

Despite being the oldest, Bitcoin is not the first blockchain network to process billion-dollar transactions. Ethereum, the second-largest crypto by market capitalization, has processed more than two billion transactions since it debuted in July 2015, as per data pulled from Etherscan.

At press time, Bitcoin was at $63,489, down a paltry 0.6% on the day.