22.3 million Bitcoin addresses were active during January

On-chain Bitcoin activity surged during January, with more than 22.3 million addresses sending or receiving BTC last month.

January was a record month for Bitcoin’s price and network activity, with more than 22.3 million unique addresses actively sending or receiving BTC over 31 days.

The milestone was spotted by crypto market data aggregator Glassnode, who tweeted that January had seen 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 the network sending or receiving $BTC – the highest monthly number in Bitcoin's history to date

Chart: https://t.co/yPPOix0KFx pic.twitter.com/yjWwYbRC98

— glassnode (@glassnode) February 1, 2021

January’s spike in activity beats out the previous record of more than 21 million active addresses from December 2017. Since 2017, the number of unique addresses engaging with Bitcoin has not fallen below 10 million per month.

Despite the increase in unique active wallets, Glassnode also noted the number of “active entities” on the Bitcoin network has decreased significantly since spiking into new highs in early January.

Glassnode defines an entity as “a cluster of addresses that are controlled by the same network entity.”

Bitcoin trade volumes spiked to record levels last month as Bitcoin surged past $30,000 to post all-time highs near $42,000 on Jan. 8 before posting three weeks of aggressive range-bound consolidation.

On Feb. 2, U.S.-based exchange Kraken announced it had processed more transactional volume during January 2021 than it had during all of 2019, with $56 billion worth of assets changing hands on the platform last month.

The month saw numerous cryptocurrency exchanges experience outages, with Kraken and Coinbase announcing measures intended to prevent future failures in the event of surging traffic and volume.