Bitcoin Crosses One Billion Transactions Milestone First Time Since Its Inception in 2009

Bitcoin, the oldest and most expensive cryptocurrency in existence, has completed its first billion transactions this week. The asset, created in 2009, has taken fifteen years to hit one billion transactions. The crypto community is elated and flooding the social networking platforms with messages congratulating each other for BTC's milestone moment. In the backdrop of this development, the asset's price currently stands at $63,582 (roughly Rs. 53 lakhs) on international exchanges like CoinMarketCap.

Bitcoin completed one billion transactions on May 5 at block number 842,241, shows Clark Moody's Bitcoin dashboard. As of Tuesday, May 7, the total number of BTC transactions stand at 1,000,701,505.

Nischal Shetty, the Founder and CEO of Indian crypto exchange WazirX took to X to comment on the development.

“This celebration of technology helps us further the Web3 ecosystem. While Bitcoin focuses on asset value and has limited transaction capacity, I'm excited about the day we celebrate 1B transactions per day in Web3,” Shetty said.

The first Bitcoin block was mined on January 3, 2009. In the 5,603 days of existence, the Bitcoin network has reportedly processed an average of 178,475 daily transactions excluding those processed through the lightning network, which is a Layer-2 Bitcoin protocol that facilitates faster transactions.

Bitcoin's completion of one billion transaction happened just weeks after the blockchain underwent its fourth halving event on April 20. Three days later on April 2023, Bitcoin recorded the highest daily transaction count of 926,000. These transaction number spiked in the backdrop of the launch of the Runes protocol.

Created by Casey Rodarmor, who also created the now popular Ordinals protocol for BTC-based NFTs, Bitcoin Runes is an innovative protocol created to address issues associated to Bitcoin-based token systems that depend on off-chain data and native tokens used for operations.

The anonymous creator of Bitcoin, pseudo named Satoshi Nakamoto, published the first ever Bitcoin Whitepaper on October 31, 2008. At the time, each BTC token was priced $0.0008 (roughly Rs. 0.067).

At present, the market cap of Bitcoin stands at $1.25 trillion (roughly Rs. 1,04,87,989 crore), shows data by CoinMarketCap. Out of the total BTC tokens capped at 21 million, 19,695,050 tokens are already in circulation. The latest all-time high for Bitcoin, $73,790 (roughly Rs. 61.6 lakh) was achieved on March 14.