Why Bitcoin Network Activity Is Low Despite Price
The Bitcoin (BTC) rate is a few percent away from its historical maximum of about $112,000. Despite this, network activity in the main cryptocurrency's blockchain has dropped to its lowest levels since 2023. This is accompanied by a decrease in volatility on the BTC trading chart, RBC Crypto reports.
As of July 7, the price of Bitcoin is around $108,350, which is about 3% from the all-time high price recorded on May 22, according to Binance. Since reaching the maximum, the price of the main cryptocurrency has been in the range of $100-110.
At the same time, the 30-day volatility of the Bitcoin (BTC) price, according to the Bitbo service, dropped from the 2025 peak of 2.8%, reached on May 21, to 1.26% by July 7. The current volatility value is the lowest since June 2024.
Volatility is a statistical measure of how much an asset (e.g. currency, stock) changes in price over a period of time. Simply put, it is a measure of how much an asset's price fluctuates. High volatility means large price fluctuations, while low volatility means small ones.
Against this backdrop, transaction activity at the blockchain network level has also fallen. According to IntoTheBlock, as of June, only 10.29 million transactions were recorded in the Bitcoin network. This level is the lowest since October 2023, when 10.14 million transactions were recorded. The historical maximum was in October 2024 at 20.48 million.
According to Joel Valenzuela, director of marketing and business development for the blockchain project Dash, the situation may indicate that retail users have left the Bitcoin network.
“To put it simply, almost all real Bitcoin users have left. And [Bitcoin] is at all-time highs!” Coindesk quotes Valenzuela, who called the situation a major crisis in which the blockchain could become “a fully custodial asset, managed by governments and institutions.”
Another side of the activity was shown by a report from blockchain research firm Flipside. Their data showed that network activity does not always equal the number of users, and the majority of transaction volume is handled by just 5% of wallets across many blockchains (not just Bitcoin), according to The Defiant.
The main conclusion of the study is that the true drivers of value in blockchain ecosystems are “high-quality users” who are “actively engaged, regularly transacting, and making meaningful contributions to the network.”
Asset or currency
Despite the relatively low activity in the Bitcoin network in terms of transactions, experts see potential for the development of the main cryptocurrency as a means of payment. For example, long-time Bitcoin supporter and Twitter (social network X) founder Jack Dorsey recently noted that the Bitcoin community should focus on scaling payments.
But at the moment, Bitcoin is not the most used asset for transactions. After all, “cryptocurrency payments” are most often associated with stablecoins – they account for two-thirds of the total volume of transactions on the crypto market, according to analysts at Chainalysis. Experts pointed out that this type of crypto assets is a key element in the process of integrating blockchain products into the financial system and economy.
Dorsey’s comments on the rise of Bitcoin payments also come amid a new trend emerging in the first half of 2025, where public companies in the stock market are starting to actively accumulate Bitcoin as a reserve. Some of these organizations, including little-known or even unprofitable ones, are resorting to borrowing to form a crypto reserve. Similar to Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy strategy, they use debt instruments to buy cryptocurrency, making it the main asset on the balance sheet.
This trend means holding bitcoin on balance, which is the opposite of using it as a payment solution. It is assumed that such investor behavior improves the scarcity properties of the main cryptocurrency, the emission of which is limited to 21 million BTC, and the more participants follow this strategy, the less bitcoins there are on the open market and the more valuable the asset.
According to Bitcointreasuries, as of July 7, more than 140 companies have accumulated almost 850 thousand BTC, or more than $92 billion, which is more than 4% of the total Bitcoin emission.
However, the activity in the Bitcoin network, although significantly lower than the maximum values, the number of transactions is at a high level (about 10 million), which has been maintained since 2017 with a temporary drop to 6 million in 2018. That is, for more than the last seven years, the activity in the Bitcoin network has been maintained at a high level regardless of the price of Bitcoin and the average daily transaction fee.
Even with the new accumulation trends, Bitcoin is still being used with the same activity as it has been for most of the time since 2017.
Источник: cryptocurrency.tech
