Last Updated: 17 August 2022
Bitcoin has reached the proud milestone of 1 billion unique addresses. This puts Bitcoin far behind Ethereum and Litecoin, with 158 million and 148 million unique addresses respectively.
Bitcoin has been declining since early 2022
The milestone is all the more gratifying because the crypto market has been in a bear market for some time. The bitcoin price has fallen by almost 50% since the beginning of this year, but has been on a slight upward trend since the summer. Currently, bitcoin is traded for just over 24 thousand euros.
Unlike the rest of the crypto market, however, Bitcoin did not see a decline in activity on its network. This is confirmed by research firm Glassnode.
Number of Bitcoin unique addresses reaches 1 billion
The latest data from Glassnode shows that the total number of unique addresses on the Bitcoin network reached its highest point ever. More than 1 billion unique addresses are currently part of the network.
In the graph below, the grey line is the bitcoin price. The light blue line is the total number of addresses on Bitcoin, orange represents the number of addresses on the Litecoin network. Purple represents the number of addresses on Ethereum.
Ethereum has more transactions per day
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation and network size, lags far behind. With 158 million unique addresses participating in its network, Ethereum does not even come close to the speed at which Bitcoin is growing.
But Ethereum can boast about something else. The number of transactions on Ethereum’s network leaves Bitcoin far behind. The chart below from Bitinfocharts plots the number of transactions per day and since the 2017 bull run, there has not been a day that Bitcoin had more transactions than Ethereum.
Litecoin falls outside top 20
Litecoin, on the other hand, has very little to offer against the violence of Bitcoin and Ethereum. For much of the past decade, LTC was still able to somewhat keep up with the other two coins in terms of market capitalisation, but litecoin is now not even in the top 20.
Incidentally, the number of unique addresses on Litecoin is growing faster than on Ethereum, but both networks experienced some stagnation in 2022.
Litecoin’s price, number of transactions and transaction volume have dropped significantly since the beginning of the year. Since the beginning of 2022, the value of LTC has declined 60%.
Litecoin also has something
Litecoin recently celebrated its tenth anniversary without the network ever going down. It is therefore safe to say that Litecoin’s network is stable, but that may also have something to do with the fact that there is less activity than on other networks.
Litecoin is the longest running crypto with 100% uptime ⚡ pic.twitter.com/oFRwpsseK8
— Litecoin (@litecoin) August 10, 2022
Bitcoin has had two downtimes in its history. These two together caused bitcoin to be down for approximately 15 hours. Yet bitcoin’s uptime is 99.98%.
Ethereum reports 100% uptime. But Ethereum has had several attacks and problems that have prompted the core team to change the client code and fork the network. Two examples:
- The start of the Ethereum DAO hack was on June 17, 2016, when a hacker extracted 3.6 million ETH from a smart contract. Although Ethereum did not experience downtime in the classic sense, the blockchain was split into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
- On 11 November 2020, the Ethereum infrastructure provider, Infura, experienced a glitch, causing many exchanges to stop recording when the chain started splitting at block 11234873 because the developers had made a change in the code.
Admittedly, we had to try very hard to find a statistic that speaks in Litecoin’s favour.
