Since its launch over 15 years ago, Bitcoin has proved its resilience by reaching the impressive milestone of one billion transactions. This milestone, achieved despite periods of high volatility and constant criticism, underlines Bitcoin’s growing adoption and robustness. At the same time, layer 2 could enable Bitcoin to further accelerate activity on its network and increase the number of transactions performed tenfold.
1 billion transactions for Bitcoin in 15 years
After more than 15 years of existence, Bitcoin has finally crossed the billion-transaction threshold.
This event deserves to be highlighted, as throughout its history, Bitcoin has often been declared dead or in decline, even as adoption of its network has remained growing.
In fact, even during periods of high BTC price volatility, when its value could plummet by over 70%, blockchain data demonstrates that Bitcoin remains impervious to price declines and continues to gain in adoption.
Transaction statistics on the Bitcoin blockchain
With an average of 3,559 transactions per block, Bitcoin records 6.1 transactions per second, totaling more than 15 million transactions over the last 30 days.
Extrapolating this average of transactions per block, we could envisage reaching a 2nd billion transactions in 280,978 blocks, or just over 5 years.
While the throughput of over 6 transactions per second may seem low compared to other blockchains capable of confirming many more transactions much more quickly, it’s worth remembering that scalability is not Bitcoin’s main objective. Its aim is to provide a solid, decentralized monetary base, and to have confirmed 1 billion transactions is simply testimony to the success of its development.
What about the Lightning Network?
Remember that the transactions mentioned earlier only concern those carried out on the main chain. Many transactions are also carried out on the Lightning Network, a layer 2 of Bitcoin that enables near-instantaneous transactions to be carried out at lower cost.
Although it’s difficult to know the exact number of transactions carried out on this network, River, a BTC exchange platform, estimates that as of August 2023, around 6.6 million transactions had been carried out on the Lightning Network.
Estimated number of transactions on the Lightning Network during August 2023
River’s report estimates a significant increase in usage over the previous year, mainly due to increased accessibility for the general public.
Thus, it can be envisaged that as Bitcoin adoption continues to grow, the number of transactions on the Lightning Network will continue to increase, potentially reaching a second billion BTC transactions faster than on the main chain.
In addition, numerous layer 2 projects on top of Bitcoin are currently under development, such as Citrea or RGB, and could enable Bitcoin to attract more users, thus increasing the volume of transactions.
By diversifying BTC’s use cases and developing more accessible and easy-to-use stablecoins, Bitcoin’s developers could generate exponential growth in the number of transactions on Bitcoin and its layer 2s.
