Although we are in a bear market, Bitcoin’s fundamentals continue to improve. In a recent post released by Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, the rating agency shows that Bitcoin (BTC) has been improving its fundamentals during the whole year.

Bitcoin is becoming more secure as the month's pass. At the beginning of 2018, Bitcoin’s hash rate was close to 17 million TH/s. It reached 60 million TH/s in August and ended the year close to 38 million TH/s.

This is very important because the network is much more secure than before. More miners are providing more energy to verify transactions and protect the whole network against 51% attacks such as the one that Ethereum Classic (ETC) experienced.

The number of active addresses has remained stable even when the market dropped substantially in the last months. According to data provided by BitInfoCharts, the number of addresses remained stable around 500,000 since April 2018. The number of addresses created on Blockchain.com continues to grow as well.

Transaction volume has also been growing since April. When Bitcoin was reaching $20,000 in December 2017, the number of transactions was 495,000 per day. After the market dropped down to $6,500 the transactions processed per day declined to 135,000 in April. Since that moment, the number of transactions increased up to 276,000 per day.

The average transaction fee has also fallen down to 25 cents from a peak of $55 dollars when Bitcoin was traded close to its all-time high in December 2017. This is in part due to the fact that participants in the network have implemented Segregated Witness (SegWit), allowing transactions to be smaller.

The Lightning Network (LN), which aims at making Bitcoin a faster and less congested network has also grown during the last year. The number of nodes has skyrocketed up to 5,674 and the channels are 22,049. Furthermore, the network capacity is 571.44 BTC, close to $2.04 million.

The Lightning Network would allow Bitcoin to process hundreds of thousands of transactions in just a few seconds without congesting the Bitcoin blockchain.

Weiss Ratings seems to be bullish about Bitcoin and its future. Back in December 2018, the company wrote a tweet in which they say that Bitcoin one of the best buying opportunities of the year.

“As a store of value Bitcoin is here to stay,”

they wrote.