Recent research has revealed that there are now more than 3 billion cryptocurrency transactions.
The research was carried out by Blocknative using data from Coin Metrics and revealed that over the last 10 years, summing the total number of transactions on 24 public blockchains, the total number of transactions exceeds 3.1 billion.
Of these, 1.1 billion were made in 2019 alone, accounting for more than 37% of all recorded blockchain transactions in history.
In fact, the real surge occurred in 2017, with 96% of all transactions occurring in the last three years.
In addition, the dollar volume of all blockchain transactions, from 2009 to 2019, has now exceeded $4.6 trillion.
It should be noted that the first decentralized blockchain was that of Bitcoin, whose first transaction dates back to January 3rd, 2009, thus the analysis takes into account the first 10 years of life of the entire industry.
In addition to Bitcoin, the following other networks were also examined: Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Tether, Ripple, Litecoin, Binance Coin, Dash, Decred, DigiByte, Dogecoin, EOS, GAS, Neo, TRON, Waves, Stellar, Monero, Tezos, Verge and Zcash.
In 2019 alone, 259.2 million transactions were recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, with Ethereum in second place with 242.8 million transactions. Together, these two blockchains accounted for 44% of the total transaction volume overall in the past year.
To do this research, Blocknative aggregated all transactions from 24 unique chains, grouping them by year and creating a comparable aggregate view of transaction volumes for each chain.
This resulted in a 5-year compound average growth rate (CAGR), which was 44% overall. If these trends continue unchanged in the future, another 20 billion new blockchain transactions can be expected over the next 5 years.
According to this projection, by 2024 Bitcoin, Ethereum, and perhaps even EOS could exceed the threshold of 1 billion transactions. Bitcoin has already exceeded 500 million total transactions, while Ethereum has even exceeded 600 million. Hence, for these two blockchains, the 1 billion threshold could be exceeded well before 2024.
The year with the most transactions was 2018, followed by 2017 and then 2019, which reveals that their number tends to be correlated with the dollar prices of the assets in which they are executed.
