BTC
Bitcoin
- Price
- $80,401
- 24h
- +3.5%
- 7d
- −0.2%
- Market cap
- $1.6T
- 24h volume
- $39.0B
Bitcoin (BTC) is a smart-contract platform and layer-1 chain. The project's stated purpose: Native currency of the Bitcoin network, described by bitcoin.org as a payment network and a new kind of money with no central authority. Its source is public and it has a technical whitepaper. It launched in January 2009. 20.1M of a maximum 21M are in circulation, or 96%. It ranks 1st by market capitalisation among the coins tracked here.
Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized cryptocurrency, created in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. It enables peer-to-peer electronic cash transactions without intermediaries like banks or governments, operating on a blockchain secured by Proof of Work mining and the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm.
With a fixed supply cap of 21 million coins and programmatic halvings every four years that reduce miner rewards, Bitcoin is designed as a deflationary digital asset often called "digital gold." Its value stems from solving the double-spending problem without trusted intermediaries, creating the first truly scarce digital asset with censorship resistance and permissionless access that no government, corporation, or individual can control.
Bitcoin operates as a decentralized peer-to-peer network where transactions are recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain, distributed across thousands of computers globally. Transactions are grouped into blocks added approximately every 10 minutes through mining, where specialized computers compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles.
Bitcoin has achieved mainstream adoption through multiple vectors.
- Circulating
- 20.1M
- Total supply
- 20.1M
- Max supply
- 21.0M
Supply as of 18h ago
Research
Researched on 30 August 2026
- Whitepaper substantive yes
- Source public yes
The project's claims
- States transactions and issuance are managed collectively by the network with no central authority or banks. source