Bitcoin hit 64k right now of composing this, April 14, 2021, setting another ATH. Bitcoin was going sideway in the 50k to 60k territory for the entirety of March, and a piece of February.
How about we investigate how is this affecting the organization. Is there expansion in the quantities of exchanges, new wallets, and the general action.
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 71M wallets now. It just crossed the 70M mark adding almost 8M wallets in the first three months of 2021.
Here is the table for the numbers of new wallets created per year in the last five years.
YearNew Wallets20165,347,934201710,814,559201810,399,937201912,605,257202018,931,959
From 12M in 2019 to almost 19M in 2020, or a 58% increase.
In the first months in 2021 we have 8M new wallets. Will be interesting to see how 2021 ends in terms of wallets, but most likely will be more than 30M new wallets in the year.
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.
The price goes up, but the numbers of new wallets is not up a lot. This is now the case for the last six months. Is it just the institutions buying? Is retail still on the sidelines, or people just use custodian wallets? Cant really tell, but the number of new BTC wallets is not following the price action for now.
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 period the number of active Bitcoin wallets has reached almost 900k per day. 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 on April 6th, with 180M 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.
Fees are rising (in $) and this last period is in the range of $ 15 to $ 25 per transaction. It's still cheaper compared to ETH 😊. For most of 2020, fees were in the range of a few dollars.
Overall, a moderate increase in the number of new wallets and active wallets. The number of active wallets still exceeds 2017 ATH and the same goes for transactions. Hash rate is always increasing and has hit new ATH in recent days. Fees are also rising.
It's interesting to watch this data for Bitcoin. Since the start of the bull run, the only time we've seen a significant increase in activity in terms of new wallets and transactions is back in November 2020. Since then, the numbers have been stable.
Let's see what a path it will follow in the future. Together we will wait and see.
this is a normal thing for me to know as lot of institutional investor coming in it every time