The number of transactions that occur hourly on the Bitcoin network has hit a new 5-year high. Last Friday, this metric topped 16,497 transactions per hour, according to data from blockchain research and analytics platform, GlassNode.
The increase this metric has seen over the past week appears to be related to the trading activity the cryptocurrency has gained with rising market prices and the growing demand for ordinal records within the blockchain.
According to GlassNode, the previous 5-year high in the number of Bitcoin transactions averaged 16,383 transactions per hour over a one-week period and was seen in May 2019. At that time, BTC was growing by around 78 % year-to-date, leading the cryptocurrency to trade near $5,700 per BTC at the time.
Currently, Bitcoin is experiencing a similar situation. So far in 2023, the price of BTC has appreciated over 70%, trading above $29,400 at the time of writing.
The increase in the number of transactions with Bitcoin coincides with the increase in the prices of the cryptocurrency in the market, as shown in the graph published by the platform GlassNode via Twitter.
Currently, the number of Bitcoin transactions that take place daily within the network exceeds 300,000 transactions, according to data from the same platform.
Bitcoin Ordinals Record Count Grows
The number of ordinal records on the Bitcoin blockchain reached 240,000 units last Sunday, April 30. This figure represents an all-time high for the Bitcoin NFT protocol.
Currently, the ordinals registered in this blockchain exceed 2.63 million units, according to data consulted on the Dune Analytics platform.
Bitcoin ordinal listings appear to be one of the main catalysts for network growth.
The Bitcoin network is becoming increasingly secure
In addition to transaction count, another important metric that has set new recent highs on the Bitcoin network is mining difficulty. This is a value used to measure how secure the Bitcoin network is. Specifically, mining difficulty refers to the complexity of solving a block’s hash on the blockchain network.
The mining difficulty is automatically adjusted according to the available computing power or the hash rate of the miners connected to the Bitcoin network. With a current hash rate of 372.7 exahashes per second (EH/s), Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has recently adjusted to an all-time high.
Data platform CoinWarz shows that Bitcoin mining difficulty was adjusted in the middle of this month to 48.7 trillion (T) or billion, currently.
In recent months, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has been adjusting with an upward trend, as the cryptocurrency pulls away from the crypto winter of 2022 and regains some of its market value.
At the beginning of October last year, the difficulty of Bitcoin mining stood at 35.6T, as reported by this media, which represents a current growth of 36%. With this new value, mining 1 BTC on the blockchain network has never been more difficult than now.
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