Bitcoin Registers New All-Time High Transaction Volume with Low Fees, Beats December 2017 Output

The largest digital asset, Bitcoin (BTC), has reached a new all-time high transaction volume on average during April. According to Kevin Rooke, a cryptocurrency user and enthusiast, daily Bitcoin transactions reached an average of 366,000 per day last month. This is 1.66% more than the last record in December 2017 when Bitcoin had 360,000 tx per day. The interesting thing to mention is that the fees paid by users were 86% lower this time.

Bitcoin Transactions Reach New Record With Lower Fees

Bitcoin has been growing over the last years. Back in December 2017, the digital currency reached its all-time high and was traded close to $20,000. At the same time, transactions and on-chain activity grew as well. When Bitcoin was reaching its price record, the fees were 616 Bitcoin per day.

Now, after an entire year in a bear market in 2018 and transactions growing, the fees have reached 89 Bitcoin per day. That means that there has been an 85% decrease in the number of fees paid by users.

Daily Bitcoin transactions just broke an all-time high in April, and tx fees were 86% lower this time around.

Dec 2017
TXs: 360k/day
TX fees: 616 BTC/day

Apr 2019
TXs: 366k/day
TX fees: 89 BTC/day pic.twitter.com/OES3mEZZuh

— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) May 1, 2019

Back in December 2017, Bitcoin had an issue with its scalability. It was not possible for its network to deal with a large number of transactions processed and the fees started to increase. With 1 MB blocks, the tx per second (TPS) surpassed the number of TPS supported by the network.

After this issue, Segregated Witness (SegWit) started to play an important role in reducing the size of each transaction. With SegWit, each of the blocks processed could add more transactions than before, increasing the TPS throughput. This ended up reducing the fees, which increased to crazy levels just for miners to process them faster.

Bitcoin developers have also started to work on the Lightning Network (LN) that would allow smaller transactions to be processed through a second layer chain. This network would be able to process thousands of transactions per second and help Bitcoin scale.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), that was created in order to scale with on-chain solutions (bigger blocks), remains one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the market but far from reaching Bitcoin’s dominance.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin has a price of $5,447 and a market cap of over $96 billion.