The number of transactions per day on the Bitcoin blockchain has been on the rise recently, and has once again eclipsed 400,000. Confirmed transactions have been on the up since the project’s inception over a decade ago and topped out at just under 500,000 transactions per day during the 2017 bull run when price hit $20,000.
The fact that intrinsic network activity is again so high may signify a change in market sentiment, as confidence and volume return to the layer-one decentralised protocol.
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Since the 2017 peak, we saw demand for on-chain transactions collapse in the face of fees rising above $25 for ‘next-block’ confirmations. Having found an activity baseline of above 150,000 transactions per day in early 2018, volume has again been climbing to historic levels due to increased demand coming from layer-two scaling solutions and sidechains like the Lightning Network and Blockstream’s Liquid Network.
The average fee for a transaction (the cost per KB of data) is also comparatively a lot lower than it once was due to space-saving optimisations such as SegWit and transaction batching, which is now even easier to deploy thanks to the support of many wallet developers upgrading to follow best practices on the network.
Outputs-per-day now over one million
A metric that has just surpassed its all-time high is the number of Bitcoin outputs per day, with this indicator now peaking at over one million. Many believe that this relevant statistic gives a better indication of overall economic activity on the Bitcoin blockchain than transactions per day since one transaction can include multiple outputs.
Other highs include the number of outputs per block (now above 7,000) and even the number of transactions per block, which has seen a significant increase to over 2,500 following data-intensive transactions moving to other smart-contracting layers on the BTC blockchain or sidechains.
To check out this and more transaction data for Bitcoin, be sure to keep an eye on the tracker at outputs.today.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.