January was a record month for the pricing and networking activity of Bitcoin, with over 22.3 million unique addresses that BTC actively sent or received during 31 days.
The milestone was noted by crypto-market aggregation agent Glassnode, who tweeted that January had the highest monthly number of unique active addresses in Bitcoin’s history:
# Bitcoin network activity at ATH.
In January, more than 22.3 million unique addresses were active in sending or receiving the network $ BTC – the highest monthly number in Bitcoin’s history to date
Graph: https://t.co/yPPOix0KFx pic.twitter.com/yjWwYbRC98
– glassnode (@glassnode) 1 February 2021
The increase in January’s activity is better than the previous record of more than 21 million active addresses as of December 2017. Since 2017, the number of unique addresses involved in Bitcoin has not fallen below 10 million per month.
Despite the increase in unique active wallets, Glassnode also noted that the number of “active entities” on the Bitcoin network has declined significantly since the start of new highs in early January.
Glassnode defines an entity as “a group of addresses controlled by the same network entity.”
Bitcoin trading volumes rose to a record level last month as Bitcoin rose more than $ 30,000 to peak at $ 42,000 on January 8, before posting three weeks of aggressive series-bound consolidation.
On February 2, the US stock exchange Kraken announced that it had processed more transaction volume during January 2021 than during 2019, with $ 56 billion in assets changing on the platform last month.
The month saw numerous disruptions to cryptocurrency exchanges, with Kraken and Coinbase announcing measures to prevent future failures in the event of increasing traffic and volume.