Blockchain now has over two million bitcoin wallets in the wild, having added roughly one million over the last six months alone.
The company tweeted the latest milestone late Sunday night, cementing its position as the world’s most popular bitcoin wallet provider.
Here’s to Two Million #Blockchain wallets, millions more, & putting #bitcoin in everyone’s hands! https://t.co/ZxHfIuom8u
— Blockchain.info (@blockchain) August 10, 2014
Peter Smith, Blockchain’s COO, said:
“Being the first bitcoin company to reach two million wallets is an exceptional honour […] The endorsement of the now millions of bitcoiners who have chosen to use our wallet is a distinction that truly humbles us as a team.”
Smith added that strong growth coupled with price stability is an indicator that the industry is moving towards a “transactions paradigm.”
Indeed, the company has witnessed rapid expansion in recent months.
Back in January 2013, Blockchain boasted more than 100,000 wallet users. The 500,000th wallet was created in late October and the company rewarded the lucky user of its 500,000th wallet with 10 BTC.
Blockchain passed the one million mark in January 2014 and by April it had about 1.5 million wallets. In other words, the organisation has doubled its wallet downloads in roughly six months.
Smith pointed out that downloads “exploded” in July, after its iOS wallet was re-launched and made available on the Apple App Store. Earlier this summer, the company also updated its Android wallet with a number of merchant-friendly features.
The competition
Blockchain is not the only bitcoin company to boast such figures. Back in February, San Francisco-based wallet provider and payments processor Coinbase entered six-digit territory and announced that it had more than a million wallets. The company had started with just 13,000 wallets in early 2013.
Bitcoin wallet provider MultiBit also passed the one million mark in March 2014. However, MultiBit cautioned that the statistics were not complete, as data on early adopter downloads dating back to 2011 was lost.
There is, however, an important caveat. A significant number of downloaded and installed wallets does not necessarily translate into active bitcoin users.
Wallets are frequently downloaded by people with a casual interest in bitcoin, which means a large number are inactive or abandoned. Blockchain.info charts shed more light on bitcoin user statistics, but it is still difficult to say how many truly active wallets are out there and how many have been abandoned.
Blockchain told CoinDesk that it is currently handling tens of thousands of transactions every day. An estimated $22bn in bitcoin transactions were made using Blockchain software so far.