Nearly $10 Trillion Have Been Settled on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Since the Bitcoin blockchain was launched back in 2009, nearly $10 trillion in value has changed hands through it, with over $7.5 trillion changing hands since 2018 after the cryptocurrency’s price and popularity surged.

According to a tweet from ARK Investment’s Yassine Elmandjra, sharing data from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, the value being settled on the bitcoin blockchain started surging in 2017 when the price of the flagship cryptocurrency moved up to a $19,000 high.

The value settled on the blockchain was calculated according to the price of BTC at the time each transaction was settled, and not according to today’s price. A major factor behind the rising value being settled on-chain is increasing trading volume.

As more users are learning about BTC and use the cryptocurrency’s blockchain, more value gets transferred over the network. With demand pushing its price up, even transaction fees have been moving up for bitcoin transactions, even though they are still far from their all-time high.

Bitcoin is, at press time, trading at $31,300 after dropping from a new all-time high above $34,000, CryptoCompare data shows. The average transaction fee on the network is currently around $9.27, down from its all-time high of $55 seen in December 2017, when BTC’s rally was fuelled by retail investors speculating.

It’s worth noting that transaction fees have, during the 2018 bear market, dipped below $1 on average, according to BitInfoCharts, making it cheaper to settle value on the Bitcoin blockchain. On top of it, value is moved on its layer-two scaling solution, the Lightning Network.

Featured image via Pixabay.

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