Number of new Bitcoin addresses has fallen to a 2018 low

What’s new? During the past week, an average of 275 000 new addresses appeared on the bitcoin network every day, which was the lowest figure since the beginning of 2018, according to analysts at The Block. Meanwhile, just six months ago, the figure was approaching the December 2017 record of 625 000 addresses per day.

The Block’s data

What else is known? According to experts, the local peak six months ago was facilitated by excitement over the upcoming approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, the launch of the Ordinals protocol to create a new type of asset in the blockchain, and the expectation of halving.

Trading of spot BTC ETFs in the US opened on January 11, since then 11 funds have raised a combined $12,63 billion and accumulated $56,26 billion worth of bitcoins, with daily inflows falling 79% from the record $1,05 billion recorded on March 12.

Ordinals, launched in January last year, allowed users to create Bitcoin NFTs, sparking a frenzy around such projects and an increase in online activity. So far, daily issuance of non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin network has fallen 98% from its November 19 peak of 475 249.

The fourth halving of the bitcoin network took place on April 20, a programmed event that cuts the award to miners for mining blocks in half every four years. This year, it was cut from 6,25 to 3,125 coins. This time, the event almost coincided with the launch of the new Runes protocol from the creator of Ordinals, which allows for the issuance of fungible tokens.

The emergence of Runes due to its popularity temporarily compensated for the loss in income of miners, as the fees in the network increased. However, as JPMorgan noted, the popularity of Runes has already begun to decline, followed by the departure of inefficient miners from the industry and, as a result, a decrease in the hashrate of the network.

That said, venture capitalists are starting to show interest in Bitcoin-based protocols, which could lead to an increase in network activity in the future. For example, Multicoin Capital led a $7 million seed round of funding for bitcoin application platform Arch Network.

Multicoin Capital also participated in a $21 million round led by a team developing a solution for scaling the Mezo bitcoin network.

Lightning Labs has tested Taproot Assets-based stablecoin transactions on the bitcoin network

The protocol uses the Lightning L2 network for conducting transactions

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Earlier this month, the L2 mainnet of the Build on Bitcoin network was launched, with several dozen applications already available.