Bitcoin hit 48k for the first on February 8, 2021, setting a new ATH. The previous ATH was reached on December 17th, 2020, when BTC crosse the 20k mark and it has been unstable since then.
Let’s take a look how is this effecting the network. Is there increase in the numbers of transactions, new wallets, and the overall activity.

It might be still early to see the full effect of the new ATH for Bitcoin, but still BTC has been hovering around the 20k level for a month.

We will be looking at:

• Total number of wallets
• Active wallets
• Hash rate
• Number of transactions
• Fees

The data presented here is mostly gathered from the blockchains charts.

Number of Wallets

Here is the chart for the total number of Bitcoin wallets created.

Bitcoin has around 67M wallets now. It crossed the 60M mark at the beginning of December 2020 and has added 7M more since then. A total of 2.7M wallets were created in January 2021, or on average 88k new wallets per day.

Here is the table for the numbers of new wallets created per year in the last five years.

Year	New Wallets
2016	5,347,934
2017	10,814,559
2018	10,399,937
2019	12,605,257
2020	18,931,959

From 12M in 2019 to almost 19M in 2020, or a 58% increase.

Here is the chart for the more recent data on new Bitcoin wallets created per day.

This one is a bit interesting. Up until November the numbers of wallets created per day was in the range of 20k to 40k. In November 2020 these numbers increased significantly reaching more than 200k wallets created per day on a few occasions. After this there is a drop in the daily wallets created and the number are around 80k per day. Still more than the 20k to 40k from before.

It is interesting to see that the numbers of new wallets created is higher in the last months than previous but not a constant growth as the price. This is suggesting that few large players are pushing the price this time around and the smaller fishes are yet to come.

Active wallets Obviously, a lot of wallets are created. But how many of the are being used?
Here is the chart.

The record high numbers for active Bitcoin wallets per day was reached in December 2017 with almost 1M active Bitcoin wallets. A sharp drop in 2018 to the 400k daily active wallets, and a steady growth since then.
In the last days the number of active Bitcoin wallets has reached almost 900k per day at the end of January 2021. Getting close to 1M but still not an ATH in active wallets

ATH in price, but not ATH in number of active wallets is another indicator that the price is driven by large accounts.

Hash Rate

The ultimate Bitcoin value is the network stability and security. The network security in a proof of work chains is measured in hash rate, or how difficult is to mine. The bigger the completion, the higher the hash rate.

We can notice that the hash rate has started to grow more significantly in 2017 and its has been going up ever since with some small bumps on the road.

Unlike the price chart, the hash rate chart has been going up and up, reaching new records every year. This shows that no matter the price miners are confident in the long-term outcome for Bitcoin and have been mined and scaling there operations even trough the bear market.

The ATH in hash rate was reached just a few days ago with 175M TH/s.

Transactions

The activity on the network is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions.

The numbers of transactions per day in the last months on average is just above 300k. Here as well we can see no significant increase in the numbers of transactions in the last period. They have been steady just above 300k. The ATH for the number of daily transactions is more than 400k and it has not been broken yet.

Fees

A bit unpopular topic the fees.

Well the fees have been going up (in terms of $) and it the last period they are more than 10$ per transaction, reaching more than 15% on some days. Still cheaper compared to ETH 😊. In most of 2020 the fees were in a range of a few dollars.

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Overall a moderate increase in the numbers of new wallets and active wallets. The number of active wallets still haven surpassed the 2017 ATH and the same goes for the transactions as well. The hash rate is growing all the time and it has hit new ATH in the last days. The fees are increasing as well.

All the best @dalz

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta