Although Bitcoin (BTC) represented the most preferred token by crypto users, its overall transaction performance was vastly surpassed by Ethereum’s (ETH) by a margin of 338% in the preceding year.
Data fetched from Nasdaq and Ycharts shared on Reddit revealed that ETH had a total transaction of 408,541,610 while there were 93,106,378 Bitcoin transactions in 2022. The average number of transactions per day for ETH was 1,119,292 and for BTC it was 255,086.
It was, however, observed that BTC followed a consistent pattern while ETH on the other hand was more volatile. This was due to the high demand during the launch of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and certain types of smart contracts at a given period in time.
While Ethereum leads in terms of transactions and activity, Bitcoin remains the most-searched cryptocurrency on the internet. A newsletter from “In Bitcoin We Trust” hinted that BTC was the most searched token on Google despite the drop in the price of BTC in 2022.
It is worth mentioning that BTC has maintained this position since 2009 when it was first released even though it was the only token at the time.
Bitcoin’s Performance in 2022
Bitcoin’s price is highly volatile and can fluctuate dramatically in a short period of time due to changes in supply and demand, news events, and other factors. 2022 was not favorable for the price of BTC and the crypto industry in general due to certain factors such as the rising inflation and monetary stance of Central Banks.
Another newsletter from In Bitcoin We trust highlighted that BTC was worth more than $46,000 at the start of 2022. Then, as time passed, its value dropped to around $16,500 by the end of 2022.
A major event that contributed to the fall of BTC price in 2022 includes the Russia/Ukraine war in February which made investors unwilling to invest in BTC due to uncertainty in the crypto market at the time. The volatility of the price of bitcoin was also driven by Central banks’ announcements of interest rate hikes geared to control inflation.
The Bitcoin mining industry was also greatly affected in 2022 with bitcoin miners selling almost 100% of their mined BTC in the past year. As reported by InsideCrypto, the top 10 bitcoin miners have sold 40.3k mined BTC from the 40.7k mined in 2022.
