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Bitcoin Hits 55k! | Let’s check the activity on the blockchain? | October 2021

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@dalz
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Bitcoin hit 55k at the moment of writing this, possibly starting another run in Q4 2021 that everyone is waiting for.
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.

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 77M wallets now. We can notice an increase in the last year or two, but lets take a look at the last year for better clarity.

I find this chart a bid odd now. I’m even wondering is everything ok with the numbers 😊. Hope blockchain.info has it right. It is one of the most prominent explorers if not the no.1 for Bitcoin.

We can see a jump in the numbers of BTC wallet per day back in November 2020. Since then the numbers dropped and in the last days they are around 30k new wallets created per day.

Bitcoin price goes up, but the numbers of new wallets no?

One of the explanations for this would be that most of the newbies use custodial wallets, exchanges or some apps. Maybe the newbies are not going into bitcoin? Maybe just the big boys buy bitcoin, those are few, and most of the retail goes for other coins? I guess its probably some mix of all the above, but I still find it strange that the numbers of new bitcoin wallets don’t follow the price at all.

The yearly chart for new bitcoin wallets

2021 is not finished yet.

Even with 2021 not finished yet, we can tell that the numbers for new wallets in 2021 will be lower then 2020. Almost 19M new wallets were added in 2020. Three more months to go and 2021 is just with 8M new wallets. Again not the numbers that you would expect in a year when BTC makes ATH.

Active wallets

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.

This year we have seen an increase in April, reaching around 900k, but not a new ATH, then a drop and in the last weeks an increase again.

The numbers of active BTC wallets at least follow the price to some extent. But again we can see that the ATH for active wallets haven’t been broken from the last bull run, while the price has reached x3 from the previous ATH.

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.

The has rate has been going mostly up, until June this year, when we can see a sharp drop. This is because of the ban on Chinese miners.

If we zoom in 2021 we get this.

At the end of June, the hash rate dropped below 100M TH/s, more than half from its previous ATH of 180M TH/s.

Since then the hash rate has been recovering and now it is around 150M TH/s, gaining most of what was lost.

Transactions

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

After the price dropped in May and June, the transactions went down as well. In the last month there has been increase again and the numbers are close to 300k tx per day.

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.

The bitcoin fees are quite low these days, with only a few dollars per transaction. This especially when compared to Ethereum. We can see the increase up to 30$ per transactions back in April, but these days the fees are around the 3$ mark.


From the numbers of wallets and transactions, this bull run for Bitcoin seems to be led by institutions. Looks like retail is not as much into Bitcoin, or most of them use custodial wallets. Both the numbers of new, active wallets and even the numbers of transactions per day haven’t broken the previous ATH.

The hash rate remains healthy and growing fast after the China ban. A new ATH was set for the hash rate in 2021.

All the best @dalz

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