According to Clark Moody’s Bitcoin Dashboard, the Bitcoin network has recorded its 1 billionth transaction.
Bitcoin transactions and associated fees have been the focus of significant discussion among industry participants in recent weeks, in part due to the introduction of Bitcoin ordinals and runes.
The latter is an alternative token protocol that was launched to coincide with the latest Bitcoin halving last month, raising transaction fees to an all-time record upon its debut.
Halvings reduce a miner’s reward by 50% approximately every four years, and in his most recent quadrennial event, a miner’s reward decreased from his 6.25 Bitcoins to his 3.125 Bitcoins.
Bitcoin is the world’s first blockchain-based cryptocurrency.
The genesis block of the network was mined by founder Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009.
Although Bitcoin was originally introduced by its pseudonymous founders as a peer-to-peer payment system, it has historically been used for tokenization, such as non-fungible or fungible tokens, compared to other networks such as Solana and Ethereum. The blockchain was inefficient for assets.
The introduction of Bitcoin ordinals brought a new wave of tokenized assets to the network by carving data into the smallest unit of Bitcoin, the Satoshi, and enabled the existence of NFT representations on the network .
With the launch of Rune, which is currently primarily used for meme coins, fungible tokens could open up new possibilities for the network, such as expanding applications in decentralized finance.