Blockchain
The Bitcoin network surpasses 1 billion transactions
The Bitcoin network has recorded its billionth transaction, according to data from Clark Moody’s Bitcoin dashboard.
Bitcoin transactions and related fees have been a key point of discussion among industry participants in recent weeks, in part due to the introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes.
The latter, a fungible token protocol launched in conjunction with Bitcoin’s latest halving last month, increased transaction fees to an all-time record during its debut.
The halving reduces miners’ rewards by about 50% every four years, with the latest four-year event cutting them from 6.25 Bitcoin to 3.125.
Bitcoin is the world’s first blockchain-based cryptocurrency.
The network’s genesis block was undermined by its founder Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009.
First introduced by the pseudonymous founder as a peer-to-peer payment system, Bitcoin has historically been an inefficient blockchain for assets tokenized as non-fungible or fungible tokens compared to other networks such as Solana or Ethereum.
The introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals brought a new wave of tokenized assets to the network by inscribing data onto satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, allowing a version of NFTs to exist on the network.
With the launch of Runes, now primarily used for memecoins, fungible tokens have the potential to introduce new possibilities to the network, such as expanded applications for decentralized finance.