Bitcoin
Bitcoin sees modest gains as network processes its millionth transaction
Bitcoin began trading Monday above $65,000 for the first time in more than a week. It has since retreated slightly, but is still 0.5% above where it was yesterday.
And what has been good for Bitcoin has been great for the rest of the crypto market. As of Monday morning, the global cryptocurrency market capitalization stands at $2.5 trillion, after having gained 1.3% the day before, according to data from CoinGecko.
At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin has retreated to $64,264.08, which is still 3% higher than last week. In the last day, US$13 billion in BTC was traded. Approximately 22% of this volume was traded on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume.
On Binance, it is the First Digital USD (FDUSD) stablecoin that has been the most popular trading pair for BTC investors, according to data from CoinGecko. FDUSD, launched by Hong Kong-based company First Digital Labs in 2023, accounted for volume worth US$3 billion in the last day.
The world’s oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has also just celebrated an anniversary of sorts. The Bitcoin network has already processed more than 1 billion transactions.
Daily Bitcoin Transactions reached a higher point this time last year, when the BRC-20 standard and ordinals soared in popularity – but not without creating a a little controversy. A vocal group of developers at the time said that BRC-20 tokens and ordinals should be blocked on the network.
But now a newcomer, Runes, has become the main driver of daily transaction growth. Just yesterday, the Bitcoin network recorded 304,306 Rune transactions, 193,439 “good old BTC” transactions, and around 4,000 Ordinals and BRC-20 transactions combined, according to a Dune panel. This means that Runes accounted for around 60% of all transactions on the network yesterday.
Runes is a protocol built on top of Bitcoin. It was described as a project that addresses BRC-20 tokens, which effectively introduced NFT-type assets to the network. Runes is an attempt to make the process of creating fungible tokens on Bitcoin more efficient and ushered in a new era of shitcoins for the OG crypto.
There were a few other noteworthy Bitcoin developments over the weekend.
For starters, a 13-year-old wallet that held 687 Bitcoins since trading for $2 just moved its stock. It was highlighted by Bitgrow founder Vivek Sen on twitter this morning.
It’s hard to say why an anonymous whale wallet created more than a decade ago moved its funds, but traders tend to interpret it as an encouraging sign when someone who could have sold at any time has held onto their BTC for so long.
“The owner of the wallet accumulated between $2 and 65 thousand,” wrote Sen. “What a legend!”