Bitcoin Sees Modest Gains as Network Processes Its 1 Billionth Transaction

Bitcoin began Monday trading above $65,000 for the first time in more than a week. It's since retraced slightly, but is still 0.5% higher than it was this time yesterday.

And what's been good for Bitcoin has been great for the rest of the crypto market. Early Monday morning the global cryptocurrency market capitalization is sitting at $2.5 trillion after having gained 1.3% in the past day, according to CoinGecko data.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price has backtracked to $64,264.08, which is still 3% higher than it was this time last week. In the past day, $13 billion worth of BTC has been traded. Roughly 22% of that volume was traded on Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by volume.

On Binance, it's the First Digital USD (FDUSD) stablecoin that's been the most popular trading pair for BTC investors, according to CoinGecko data. FDUSD, launched by Hong Kong based company First Digital Labs in 2023, has accounted for $3 billion worth of volume in the past day. 

The world's oldest and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization also just celebrated a birthday of sorts. The Bitcoin network has now processed more than 1 billion transactions.

Bitcoin daily transactions spiked to an all-time high this time last year, when the BRC-20 standard and ordinals soared in popularity—but not without creating a bit of controversy. A vocal group of developers at the time said that BRC-20 tokens and ordinals should be blocked on the network.

But now a newcomer, Runes, has become the main driver behind growing daily transactions. Just yesterday, the Bitcoin network saw 304,306 Runes transactions, 193,439 "good old BTC" transactions, and about 4,000 of Ordinals and BRC-20 transactions combined, according to a Dune dashboard. That means Runes made up roughly 60% of all transactions on the network yesterday.

Runes is a protocol built on top of Bitcoin. It's been described as a project that picks up where BRC-20 tokens, which effectively introduced NFT-like assets to the network. Runes is an attempt to make the process of creating fungible tokens on Bitcoin more efficient and has ushered in a new era of shitcoins for the crypto OG.

There have been a few other noteworthy Bitcoin developments over the weekend.

For starters, a 13-year-old wallet that's held 687 Bitcoin since it was trading for $2 has just moved their stash. It was highlighted by Bitgrow founder Vivek Sen on Twitter earlier this morning.

It's hard to say why an anonymous whale wallet that was created more than a decade ago moved its funds, but traders tend to take it as a heartening sign when someone who could have sold at any time held onto their BTC for so long.

"The owner of the wallet hodled all the way from $2 to 65,000," Sen wrote. "What a legend!"