Daily Transactions

What this measures

This chart counts the number of Bitcoin transactions confirmed on the blockchain each day, based on Coin Metrics data. Despite the “nvt” identifier in its URL, it is not the NVT ratio (market capitalization divided by transferred volume) but a plain count of on-chain transactions. The transactions per second chart uses the same data, divided by the 86,400 seconds in a day.

A transaction is not a payment

A Bitcoin transaction spends one or more UTXOs and creates new outputs. It can contain a single payment, hundreds of them, or none at all. An exchange that bundles its withdrawals into one transaction (batching) pays hundreds of customers in a single unit on this chart. Conversely, a user consolidating their own UTXOs creates a transaction without any value changing hands. The amount plays no part either: a 1,000 BTC transfer counts as 1, just like a payment of a few thousand satoshis.

The network also has a physical ceiling. With roughly 144 blocks a day, each capped at 4 million weight units, the chain handles on the order of a few hundred thousand transactions daily, depending on their size. That is why the count should be read alongside average block weight: full blocks carrying fewer transactions point to heavier transactions, not weaker demand.

More transactions does not mean more use

In 2023, Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 tokens flooded the chain with small transactions. In April 2024, the launch of Runes at the very moment of the halving pushed daily transaction counts to record highs. These spikes reflect real demand for block space, paid for in fees, but they say nothing about Bitcoin’s use as money.

The opposite movement matters just as much. When fees rise, exchanges have every reason to batch their payments and users to move small amounts to other layers. On Lightning, thousands of payments can fit between a channel’s opening and its closing. Protocols such as Ark bundle the outputs of many users into a single on-chain transaction.

🪙 What is the Ark protocol? The missing piece to make Bitcoin a scalable everyday currency

A flat curve, then, does not necessarily describe a neglected network. It can just as well describe a network that has learned to economize on scarce block space, whose price shows up in the median fee rate.