15 years after its founding, the Bitcoin network has handled its one billionth transaction, which is a significant milestone.

According to Clark Moody's Bitcoin dashboard, on May 5 at 9:34 p.m. UTC, transaction 1,000,000,000 was completed in block 842,241. It happened 15 years and 4 months after the first network block was mined on January 3, 2009, by the anonymous Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. In its 5,603 days of operation, the network has handled 178,475 transactions on average every day.

Nevertheless, transactions conducted using the Lightning Network—a Bitcoin layer-2 payment system that facilitates quicker transactions—are not included in the total. The Lightning Network handled at least 6.6 million transactions in August 2023, as reported by the Bitcoin-only exchange River. This suggests that hundreds of millions of transactions have been made on Lightning since its introduction in January 2018. During Bitcoin's fourth halving event on April 20, the number of daily transactions significantly increased. On April 23, there was a record high of 926,000 transactions processed.

The surge in demand can largely be attributed to the introduction of the Runes protocol at block 840,000. Nevertheless, the number of daily transactions for Bitcoin has recently decreased to 660,260 on May 4. Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency network to complete one billion transactions, even if it is the oldest. Ethereum, a main competitor of Bitcoin, has processed over two billion transactions since it was introduced in July 2015, as reported by Etherscan data.

According to CoinGecko, the price of bitcoin is at $63,750, up more than 12% from its two-month low of $56,800 on May 2. Still, it is down 13.6% from the peak it reached on March 13 of $73,740.