After a rocky end to 2022, Bitcoin finished the first quarter well in the green, recording an impressive 70% in gains.
The core network activity depicted a bullish picture amidst the broader market recovery. According to data compiling the performance of the network and the asset in Q1, Bitcoin surpassed 800 million transactions for over $107 trillion cumulatively. This is a huge feat for a network in existence since 2008 only.
Despite the bear market, active addresses on the Bitcoin network have been on an uptrend.
In terms of distributed supply, the number of entities holding less than 10 BTC has also increased to 17% of the total supply.
The emergence of Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin was enabled by the Taproot soft fork, which took effect last November. While this has been controversial, a tremendous increase in the adoption and utilization of Taproot was observed.
With the transaction count exploding, it is expected to generate more revenue for miners in the form of transaction fees.
An increase in total transaction fees as well as the percentage of miner revenue from fees, signals the sustainable security model of Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, the network hash rate is hovering near all-time highs after hitting a record level of 400 Eh/s, offering a much-needed boost to the ailing mining sector.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network capacity also surged beyond $50 million. While the adoption has been low, the turnaround has been encouraging for its development.
Recently, a report from Valkyrie Investments noted that LN adoption is gaining steam in emerging markets such as South America and Africa, primarily owing to the efforts of the LN mobile payment application Strike.
Bitcoin also managed to outperform most assets in Q1, which according to ITB research, “is indicative of its growing appeal as a digital store of value, with its correlation with gold prices increasing from -0.3 at the beginning of the year to 0.9 closing the quarter.”
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