On-chain analytics firm Glassnode has revealed how much of Bitcoin’s total cumulative volume reflects “real” transactions.
The entity’s modified approach regarding the volume of bitcoins reveals a shocking truth
In its last weekly report… Vitreous node Discuss what some of the fundamental metrics of the Bitcoin network look like after the price of the cryptocurrency hits $100,000.
Among these indicators is “transfer volume”, which measures the total amount of cryptocurrency that is used in transactions on the blockchain every day.
Below is a chart of the metric shared by the analytics company that shows how the cumulative value of this metric has evolved over the asset’s history.
The value of the metric appears to have reached a new milestone recently | Source: Glassnode's The Week Onchain - Week 50, 2024
From the chart, it appears that Bitcoin’s cumulative transfer volume (colored in green) rose sharply during the last cycle, but has slowed in this new cycle. However, the index has continued to see growth, now surpassing the $131 trillion mark.
Note that the volume here is calculated based on the value of the US dollar at the time of executing a particular transaction on the network, rather than using the total volume of Bitcoin converted into dollars at the current exchange rate.
In the same graph, Glassnode also attached data for another metric: entity-adjusted transfer volume. This indicator calculates the cumulative transfer volume that occurs between different entities.
“Entity” here refers to a group of addresses that the analytics company has determined belong to the same investor. Transactions between addresses of the same owner are not really relevant to the broader market, so entity-adjusted metrics tend to provide a more accurate representation of trading activity.
“After applying the entity adjustment, the cleared transfer volume is $11.63 trillion, just 8.86% of the total,” Glassnode notes. This means that less than 9% of Bitcoin’s total volume involves transfers that are economic in nature.
Does this mean that most Bitcoin activity is “fake”? Well, the answer to that depends on how you define “real” activity. If activity were instead measured using the pure number of transactions rather than their value, a very different picture of the network would be produced.
Below is a chart from the same report showing the data on the cryptocurrency’s cumulative transaction count, both the unfiltered version and adjusted by entity:
Looks like the difference between these two metrics isn't too significant | Source: Glassnode's The Week Onchain - Week 50, 2024
As shown in the chart above, the number of unfiltered transactions for Bitcoin, although still larger, does not have a significant divergence from the entity-adjusted measure.
This means that 840 million transfers between different entities constituted only 8.8% of the transfer volume. The bottom line here is of course that the volume inflation came from internal management by centralized exchanges, as these platforms hold very large amounts and therefore their volume also tends to rise.
While such transfers may not contribute to Bitcoin’s price movement, they are still “real” transactions from a network perspective, giving a clear impact in terms of mining transaction fee revenue.
Bitcoin price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $101,100, down about 2% over the past week.
The price of the coin appears to have surged in the last two days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, Glassnode.com, chart from TradingView.com
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