Bitcoin may still be in a bear market, but the number of daily Bitcoin network transactions has skyrocketed over the past few days. Considering the shutdown of the VeriBlock testnet and launch of the their mainnet, it seems clear this project had a key role in this recent Bitcoin transaction count explosion.

VeriBlock is used by altcoins in an effort to improve their own security by piggybacking on top of Bitcoin’s network hashrate. Earlier this year, VeriBlock’s testnet was found to have accounted for roughly 20% of daily Bitcoin transactions.

The Numbers

When looking at the Coin Metrics chart of daily Bitcoin transactions since the beginning of the bear market in December 2017, there are three main attributes that stick out.

There was a massive decline in transactions per day after the bitcoin price began to falter in late 2017. There has been a gradual uptick in Bitcoin transactions per day since then. There is a statistically anomaly in March 2019 where the upward trend broke for a little while, as if there were a chunk of daily transactions missing.

Now that the upward trend is back on course, Bitcoin has reached a daily transaction count not seen since January 4, 2018, when the bitcoin price was $15,120.24 (according to Messari).