Bitcoin (BTC) continues to grow and expand every single day despite the current bear trend. The leading cryptocurrency in the market has reached a new record in terms of on-chain USD transaction volume. This is according to data provided by Rafael Schultze-Kraft, the co-founder and CTO of Glassnode.
Bitcoin On-Chain Volume Surges
According to data shared by Mr. Schultze-Kraft, $8.9 billion in Bitcoin were moved on-chain in a single hour. This is the highest hourly USD transaction volume in Bitcoin’s history. This has surpassed the previous record registered earlier this year, possibly when Bitcoin was close to $13,750, the highest point reached by Bitcoin in over a year.
$8.9 billion in #Bitcoin were moved on–chain in a single hour this afternoon.
It's the highest hourly USD transaction volume in Bitcoin's history ?? pic.twitter.com/pWdXBszuIc
— Rafael Schultze-Kraft (@n3ocortex) December 4, 2019
The surprising fact about this is that new records are usually registered during bull markets or periods close to all-time highs. Nevertheless, Bitcoin is currently being traded sideways in a bear trend that started in June this year.
However, there is an explanation that Glassnode shared with the community. The $8.9 billion spike in on-chain volume was caused by the cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex. The platform decided to move a large amount of Bitcoin several times.
Indeed, Whale Alert, another Twitter account reporting large crypto on-chain movements, registered these transfers as well.
?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? 56,277 #BTC (419,360,032 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 4, 2019
Each of the transactions moved close to ~56,000 BTC (~$420,000,000) at the time of the transfer.
Although many users and enthusiasts were worried about the reason behind these transfers, Whale Alert explained that the process is usually called peeling and is normal behaviour for wallets that many exchanges use to store users’ funds.
It is also worth mentioning that the transactions were very large but the fees paid by the exchange were very low. Indeed, some of the fees were below $0.9, which is extremely low for transferring funds in such a secure way and without intermediaries.
Despite having low fees, several individuals and enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin has very high fees that wouldn’t allow the network to properly expand. This is why developers are currently working on the Lightning Network (LN), a second-layer scaling solution that aims at improving Bitcoin scalability and transaction speeds for small transfers.
At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin is being traded around $7,315 and it has a market capitalization of $132.31 billion.
