Yesterday, December 17th, 2020, Bitcoin smashed the 20k and has reached 23k at some point. Lets take a look how is this effecting the network. Is there increase in the numbers of transactions, new wallets, and the overall activity.
It might be still early to see the full effect of the new ATH for Bitcoin, but still BTC has been hovering around the 20k level for a month.
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.
In the last month Bitcoin crossed the 60M mark for wallets and now have more than 61M wallets.
In January 2020, the number of BTC wallets was around 44.5M. This means a total of 16.5M Bitcoin wallets were created in 2020 only.
For reference, in from 2017, 2018 and 2019 there was around 11M to 12M Bitcoin wallets created per year. 2020 will be the record high for new Bitcoin wallets.
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. In the last days there is more than 100k wallets created daily.
Looks like the run from 10k to 20k caused the increase of the new wallets, even before BTC heating new ATH.
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 days the number of active Bitcoin wallets has reached 750k per day. Getting close to the 1M, but still has not surpassed the number of active daily wallets from 2017.
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 at the end of October 2020 with more than 152M TH/s.
No significant increase in the last days.
Transactions
The activity on the network is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions.
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.
Fees
A bit unpopular topic the fees.
The fees chart for 2020 seems to follow the chart for the numbers of wallets created, at least in the last few months. Same as for the numbers of wallets created there is a spike in the fees in November ad now there are on some reasonable level at 4$ to 5$ per transaction.
From the above it looks like Bitcoin has seen some increase in the metrics like number of wallets and fees in November 2020, but not yet in December 2020. It might be still early to see the full effect from the price move.
Anyway this might be a sign that the buying is coming from large accounts and not from a massive number of new accounts. Those will probably come later 😊.
