An article reviews the trends of Bitcoin data in Q1 2020

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• Bitcoin transaction volume in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 61% compared with the previous quarter;

• Bitcoin transaction batching has also increased with Coinbase launching the feature.

The Block investigated the first quarter of 2020 data for Bitcoin, and the following chart contains the predicted values ​​for the last two days of this quarter. In the first quarter of this year, the Bitcoin trading volume of "The Block 22" exchanges (22 compliant exchanges with large trading volumes certified by The Block) increased by 61% from the previous quarter, from US$96 billion to more than US$154 billion. During this period, the average daily price of Bitcoin increased by only 4%.

Bitcoin Transaction Volume While Bitcoin transaction volume increased significantly in the first quarter of 2020, the value of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain increased by only 11% from the previous quarter. Bitcoin transaction volume in the first quarter of 2020 exceeded $178 billion, an average of $1.98 billion per day.

On the other hand, transaction fees fell slightly in the first quarter of 2020, with users paying miners almost the same amount as in the previous quarter.

SegWit
In the fourth quarter of 2019, SegWit transactions accounted for an all-time high in terms of the percentage of total transactions. The first quarter of 2020 also hit a record high, with SegWit transactions accounting for 70% in late January.

In the first quarter of 2020, the transaction volume share of SegWit (v) began to consistently exceed the transaction count share of SegWit (t). This indicates that users continue to choose SegWit for large transactions. In the fourth quarter of 2019, t was higher than v for nearly a third of the time. In the first quarter of 2020, t was higher than v only 5% of the time. The v and t values ​​of SegWit hovered between 47-50% at the end of the quarter. Since the implementation of the SegWit technical solution, the Bitcoin block size has often exceeded the 1MB limit. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the average daily block size was about 1.14MB. In the first quarter of 2020, the average daily block size was about 1.17MB, an increase of 2.5% from the previous quarter.

Lightning Network The total number of public channels in the Lightning Network increased by 3% in the first quarter of 2020. We note that some studies have shown that private channels are becoming an important part of Lightning Network channels, which is not reflected in the data analysis in this section.

This quarter, the Bitcoin stock of the Lightning Network increased by 6%, while the USD stock decreased by 31%. The average Bitcoin and USD stock of a single private channel was 0.0274 BTC and 230.12 USD, respectively.

Liquid Sidechain The amount of Bitcoin circulating in Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain has surged, up 884%.

Batching Bitcoin transaction batching has seen a significant boost in the first quarter of 2020, with Coinbase announcing on March 12 that the platform had launched a batching feature. Following the launch of the feature, The Block found an 8% increase in Bitcoin batched outputs. Since Q3 2019, the average Bitcoin batching percentage has been around 30%. As of this writing, it is around 38%.

UTXO Set Bitcoin's set of unspent transaction outputs remained stable in the first quarter of 2020. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the UTXO set increased by 3%. In the first quarter of 2020, the UTXO set also increased by 3%. The size of Bitcoin's UTXO set directly affects the amount of storage required to maintain a Bitcoin full node, because the node must store and regularly update the entire UTXO data set. Bitcoin developers are working on various solutions to cope with the problem of the growing data set.