Bitcoin Hits 1 Billion Transactions 15 Years Post-Launch

Bitcoin finally achieved 1 billion transactions a decade and a half after its launch. 
What took so long for the biggest cryptocurrency to get here?

Bitcoin has recently hit an important benchmark, processing its one-billionth transaction on the blockchain, as data from Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard confirms. 

This achievement, celebrated fifteen years after its inception, underscores the growing adoption of Bitcoin in the global financial landscape. 

The debates surrounding Bitcoin transactions and commissions have intensified with the introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes, further shaping the future of the virtual asset. 

Runes, one of the fungible token protocols that devised the last Bitcoin halving, resulted in the highest transaction fees ever. Mainly left to meme coins, Runes may attract new possibilities in decentralised finance.  

Bitcoin, the pioneer of blockchain-based cryptocurrency, was developed by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who mined the genesis block in January 2009. 

Every four years, halving reduces BTC miners' rewards, and the last halving reduced the reward to half, from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Initially designed as a peer-to-peer payment network, Bitcoin’s blockchain remains historically inferior for tokenised assets such as fungible and non-fungible tokens compared with other networks like Solana and Ethereum. 

Nevertheless, the emergence of Bitcoin Ordinals has revolutionised the tokenised asset world by encoding information into satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. This characteristic made NFTs set foot on the Bitcoin network.  

However, Bitcoin did reach this mark after Ethereum had achieved that same milestone, and it now travels the journey to one billion transactions much slower than its main competitor. Launched six years after Bitcoin, Ethereum has handled almost 2.4 billion transactions based on data from Etherscan. 

Recommended Read: Ethereum Explained

Nevertheless, Bitcoin’s transaction count does not account for its layer-2 Lightning Network activity. River, a Bitcoin-only exchange, reported that the Lightning Network handled over 6.6 million transactions in August 2023, and there could be hundreds of millions more of such transactions since its introduction six years earlier. 

What Next for Bitcoin After 1 Billion Transactions?

Recently, Bitcoin reached a critical milestone by completing over a billion transactions on its network.  

This major event was documented in the on-chain statistics of Clark Moody’s dashboard, which read 1,000,193,647 transactions at block 842241.  

Insights from Swan further show that April 23 was the high point of Bitcoin transactions in 2024, with 926,842 transactions taking place as the price of Bitcoin(BTC) reached $66,403, compared to 625,859 transactions the previous day when Bitcoin was at around $64,000.

Nevertheless, the scalability question is an open debate. Crypto analyst Colin Talks Crypto has identified possible problems, stating that the price of Bitcoin could experience “euphoric blow-off tops,” which would cause congestion and transaction rate inflations.  

He says that fees may make it hardly affordable for most Bitcoin hodlers to conduct transactions, meaning that over 90% of address balances would be unspendable.

As Bitcoin grapples with these challenges, the community is divided on the best way forward. `Big blockers’ advocate increasing block sizes to enable more transactions and minimise costs.

At the same time, small blockers value decentralisation and security over significant protocol changes. Some advocate for significant protocol changes to enhance scalability, while others argue that the current infrastructure and second-layer solutions, like the Lightning Network, will naturally expand with demand.  

Both sides agree that any evolution must uphold Bitcoin's foundational values without compromising its core principles.