Eight hundred weeks and one day after Bitcoin BTC -0.14% launched on January 3, 2009, with the minting of its genesis block, the world's most valuable cryptocurrency has surpassed one billion processed transactions. 

The milestone comes at an especially exciting time for the cryptocurrency, which has seen heightened levels of daily transactions for the past year as novel protocols like Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes attract more and more activity on the world's first blockchain. The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs also led to bullish sentiment for the token over the past year. 

Bitcoin is far from the first blockchain to hit the one billion transaction milestone; its rival Ethereum ETH +0.81% , for instance, has processed nearly 2.4 billion transactions. However, at an average rate of 6 transactions per second over the past 30 days, according to Clark Moody's Bitcoin dashboard, Bitcoin had a longer and slower journey to this latest milestone, which happened to come mere weeks after its most recent programmed halving event.

While daily transaction fees have largely cooled following the halving hype, the seven-day moving average of transactions on the chain remains high compared to most of Bitcoin's history, outside of the past year, as Bitcoin begins the long journey towards two billion total transactions.