Daily Transaction Count

Daily Transaction Count plots the number of confirmed on-chain Bitcoin transactions per day, from 17 Jan 2009 through to yesterday’s close. The primary line is the 30-day simple moving average; the raw daily count sits at lower opacity beneath, useful for reading event spikes that the smoothed line otherwise hides. Price runs muted on the log-scale left axis for cycle context.

Today’s 30-day average is 568,968; the year-over-year change is +40.0%; the regime bucket reads as Expansion. The chart’s shape is defined by two ceilings — the protocol-level cap on block weight that saturates the count near 500,000 ordinary transactions per day, and the more recent inscription-driven exemption that pushes total counts above 700,000 during BRC-20 and Runes activity bursts.

The single most important fact this chart records is that base-layer transaction count and price have decoupled. The 2013 and 2017 cycle tops printed record transaction counts alongside record prices — the count was a reasonable adoption proxy. The 2021 top did not. The 2024–26 cycle has not. The chart now answers a narrower question than it used to: how busy is the base layer specifically, with what kind of activity?

Walk through the four major tops. In December 2013, the count printed in the tens-of-thousands range and price reached its first $1,000+ region. In December 2017, the count peaked at roughly 405,709 a few weeks before the price top, with the cycle-top day itself printing 391,910 transactions at $19,424. In November 2021, the cycle-top day printed roughly 301,025 transactions — below the 2017 top — at $67,145, a price 3.6× higher. And in April 2024, the day after the halving and the Runes launch printed roughly 927,010 transactions, the all-time high, but in a regime where the additional volume was almost entirely small inscription activity rather than wallet payments.

Two structural shifts explain the 2017→2021 decline despite price growth. First, the Lightning Network mainnet launched in March 2018; between 2018 and 2021 it absorbed a meaningful share of small-value payment activity off the base layer. Second, exchange-internal transfers and large-custody batching consolidated what used to be many user-visible movements into a single coinbase-to-coinbase or hot-wallet-to-cold-wallet transaction. The same payment activity, fewer rows in the count.

Then 2023 and 2024 reversed direction for a different reason. Ordinals activity in early 2023, the BRC-20 token wave starting in March 2023, and the Runes launch at the April 2024 halving each pushed the count above its prior payment-only ceiling. But the additional transactions are protocol metadata and small token mints, not user wallet payments. The chart no longer reads as a single coherent “adoption” gauge — it reads as a composite of payments + inscriptions + batching effects, which is a useful but harder thing to interpret.

For each day d:

count(d) = number of confirmed transactions in blocks mined that day
sma30(d) = mean(count(d-29) … count(d))
yoy(d) = sma30(d) / sma30(d-365) − 1

The headline regime bucket comes from yoy on the 30-day SMA: Expansion above +30%, Contracting below −10%, Stable in between. The 30-day window damps the day-to-day noise from inscription waves; the YoY frame puts each reading in cycle context.

The series spans 17 Jan 2009 to 28 Apr 2026. Pre-2020 daily resolution is sparser than the recent tail by source design; the SMA windows treat the available points as the trend signal and downweight gaps. Methodology and the source reconciliation are documented on the methodology page.

Three useful lenses, in increasing order of analytic value. Level reading. Today’s 30-day average against the 250–500k payment-era band: above the band — inscription activity is alive; below the band — either bear-market quiet or off-chain routing has won. YoY reading. The headline regime bucket; useful as a momentum filter but noisy near the 30-percent threshold. Cycle-aligned reading. The cycle-anchor table below puts every reading in context against price at that anchor; this is where the decoupling story shows up unambiguously.

The raw daily line is essential context for the SMA. Inscription days print multi-hundred-thousand-transaction one-day spikes that the 30-day average smooths into a small step rather than a needle. Reading the SMA without the raw line risks treating a one-week token mint as a regime shift.

The cycle-anchor table makes the decoupling story explicit. Each row reads the raw count and the 30-day SMA at a canonical date alongside the closing price. The 2017 top, the 2021 top, and the 2024 inscription peak are the three readings most worth lingering on — together they describe the chart’s shifting meaning across three cycles.

Three protocol events account for most of the 2023–26 spikes above the historical payment-only ceiling. Ordinals — the practice of inscribing arbitrary data into the witness portion of a SegWit transaction — began in early 2023 and produced the first sustained counts above 500,000 since 2017. BRC-20, a fungible-token experiment built on top of Ordinals, launched in March 2023 and pushed counts above 600,000 by mid-year. Runes — a more compact token protocol — launched at the April 2024 halving and produced the single-day all-time high in count.

Each of these protocols produces small base-layer transactions in volume: mints, transfers, and metadata commits. They are real consensus-layer activity — the network is genuinely processing every one — but they are not the wallet-payment use-case the chart historically tracked. Treating an inscription spike as “adoption growth” is a category error; treating it as zero is also wrong, because miners are paid for it and it consumes the same blockspace as payments. The honest reading is that the chart now measures blockspace consumption, full stop, and the analyst has to decide which of its components matter to the question being asked.

For an investor. Do not use base-layer count as a Bitcoin adoption gauge in 2026. The 2017→2021 trough below price tracks structural off-chain migration, not declining usage; the 2023–24 spikes above the historical ceiling track inscription activity, not payment activity. The cleanest sentiment lenses for adoption sit elsewhere on the site — active addresses for unique on-chain participants, ETF flows for institutional demand. Use this chart for blockspace, not for adoption.

For a network operator or builder. The count is the cleanest read of base-layer congestion that exists. Saturated counts (~400–500k+ sustained) are the operational signal that fees will rise on any incremental demand and that batching/Lightning offload becomes economically attractive. The cycle-anchor table above is the historical reference for what kinds of events have moved the SMA most.

For a researcher or analyst. Pair the count with daily fees and read the ratio. A demand-bound regime — rising fees, rising count — tells a different story than a capacity-bound regime — rising fees, count flat — or a routing-displacement regime — flat fees, flat count, despite obvious user-side activity. The component decomposition is where the analytical value lives in 2026; the headline number is a starting point.

Lightning and L2 are invisible. Lightning routing, sidechain (Liquid, Rootstock) activity, and federated-bridge transfers do not hit the base layer and do not appear in the count. Public estimates put Lightning capacity in the tens of thousands of BTC routed per year; none of that is reflected here. Use this chart for base-layer specifically.

Inscription protocols inflate the count. Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes each generate large numbers of small base-layer transactions during activity bursts. Those bursts are real consensus-layer events — miners are paid for them, the network bears the load — but they are not the wallet-payment activity the count historically tracked. The chart blends both; the analyst has to separate them by hand.

Batching consolidates many actions into one row. Exchange sweeps, large custody re-balances, and CoinJoin coordination can collapse what a user-side observer would call “dozens of transfers” into a single base-layer transaction with many inputs and outputs. The count undercounts user activity in proportion to the share of activity that flows through batchers, which has grown materially since 2018.

The early-history resolution is sparser. Pre-2020 the source data resolution drops to a four-day cadence; the chart preserves whatever the source provides, so SMA windows are effectively wider during that era. Treat pre-2020 readings as a coarser long-run trend, not a daily-precision read.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” for bitcoin transactions per day, bitcoin tx count, and bitcoin saturation, answered against the data on this page.