Key Points
- Bitcoin regained the $65k level, and the coin is now up by over 2% in the past 24 hours.
- On May 5, the Bitcoin network processed its one billionth transaction.
Bitcoin has just managed to regain its $65k level following a week of intense price volatility. At the moment of writng this article, BTC is trading at over $65,200, up by over 2% on CoinMarketCap.
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Bitcoin managed to get back to the important level of $65k, following a rough start the other week, when Bitcoin’s price dropped to its lowest levels in more than two months as May kicked off. The digital asset dipped to a little above $56,500.
Bitcoin network processed its one billionth transaction
On May 5, the Bitcoin network processed its one billionth transaction, marking an important milestone moment for the network. This came 15 years after the Bitcoin network was created.
According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard, the transaction with the number 1,000,000,000 was processed in block 842,241 at 9:34 pm UTC the other day.
The important milestone was reached 15 years, four months, and four days after Satoshi Nakamoto mined the very first block on the network on January 3.
The network processed an average of 178,475 daily transactions in its 5,603-day existence. However, this count does not include transactions that have been made on the Lightning Network – the Bitcoin Layer-2 payment protocol that enables faster transactions.
According to data coming from the Bitcoin-only exchange River, the Lightning Network processed about 6.6 million transactions only in August 2023. This suggests that hundreds of millions of transactions have been made on Lightning since it was launched back in January 2018.
The daily Bitcoin transactions spiked around the fourth halving event that took place on April 20.
The network recorded a high of 926,000 transactions processed on April 23. Much of this high demand came from the launch of the Runes protocol, which took place on the same day as Bitcoin’s halving at block 840,000.
The launch of the Runes protocol has been an important milestone for the Bitcoin ecosystem – it enhances Bitcoin’s transactional capacity by introducing symbolic representations of data within Bitcoin transactions.
This abstraction layer is able to boost privacy and security, and it also enables the encoding of more complex data structures within the Bitcoin blockchain.
