More than a billion transactions have been made on the Bitcoin network

The Bitcoin network has reached a new milestone by processing one billion transactions 15 years, four months, and four days after the creation of its first block. This milestone occurred when the billionth transaction was included in block 842,241 on Sunday, May 5.

The latest milestone was reached less than three weeks after the fourth bitcoin halving, during which the reward per block for miners decreased from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. This halving took place on April 19, when the total number of transactions on the Bitcoin network was approaching 990.64 million.

Recently, there has been a significant increase in daily transactions on the network, which is associated with the launch of new protocols such as Ordinals, Runes, and the BRC-20 token standard.

In addition, the launch of ETF-BTC spot exchange-traded funds in the United States and Hong Kong has also contributed to the growth in the number of transactions on the main cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Currently, the market capitalization of the Bitcoin ETF is $ 53.41 billion with assets under management of $ 52.68 billion.

Note that while it took the main cryptocurrency about 15 years to process one billion transactions, it is likely that the second billion transactions will be reached in a shorter time as BTC gains more acceptance and users continue to join the blockchain. It is important to note that Bitcoin is not the first blockchain to reach the one billion transaction mark. Ethereum did it a few years ago and has since processed over 2.4 billion transactions since its launch in 2015.

This number of transactions on the Bitcoin network does not include those executed via the Lightning Network, a second-level protocol launched in 2018.