- The Bitcoin network processed its one-billionth transaction over the weekend, 15 years after the network launched in January 2009.
- It’s likely Bitcoin’s next billion transactions will come much faster as transaction volume increases due to the introduction of new technologies like ordinals and Runes protocol.
- Just prior to the billionth transaction, a long-dormant Bitcoin wallet containing almost 700 BTC became active, with its contents being split and sent to two new wallets.
The Bitcoin network hit a huge milestone over the weekend as it processed its one-billionth transaction on Sunday, a little over 15 years after the network was launched.
Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, which tracks a wide range of Bitcoin statistics, showed that the 1 billionth transaction was processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC on May 5, about 7:30 am Monday AEST.
Coincidentally, around the same time the billionth transaction was processed, a dormant Satoshi-era wallet containing almost 700 BTC became active, splitting the wallet’s contents and sending it to two new addresses.
Related: Analyst Jason Pizzino Says Bitcoin Low Incoming, Here is His Take on The Market
One Billion Transactions And Counting
Bitcoin’s billionth transaction came exactly 15 years, four months and four days after the network was launched, way back on January 3, 2009.
In total the network took 5,603 days to process its first billion transactions at an average of 178,475 transactions per day for every day of its existence. This count doesn’t include transactions processed through Bitcoin’s layer 2 Lightning Network, which is estimated to have processed an additional several hundred million transactions.
To put it into some context, the Visa network took around 25 years to hit one billion transactions. But some crypto networks have processed a far higher volume of transactions than Bitcoin, with Ethereum having processed well over two billion and the Hedera network having recently celebrated crossing 50 billion.
Recently, the pace of transactions on Bitcoin has increased with the introduction of ordinals and the associated Runes protocol. The largest single-day transaction volume on Bitcoin was April 23 this year, with over 925,000 transactions being processed—over 90% of which used the Runes protocol that launched April 20.
Dormant Wallet Awakens Just Before Billionth Transaction
Coincidentally, a long dormant Satoshi-era wallet became active just hours before the billionth transaction was processed. The wallet, which contained 687 BTC valued at US$43.9 million (AU$66.3 million), had its contents split and sent to two new wallet addresses on the morning of May 6 — the majority 625.43 BTC was sent to one of the new wallets, while 61.9 BTC was sent to another.
Related: Dormant Bitcoin Wallet Awakens After 14 Years, Transfers 50 BTC to Exchange
According to X user and blockchain investigator, Lookonchain, the wallet had been dormant for over a decade since it first received the Bitcoin on January 12, 2014, at the time Bitcoin was valued at around US$917.
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