Bitcoin Real-Time Charts & Market Data

Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009. It is a new form of digital money managed by participants on a global peer-to-peer network, with no central bank or single issuer.

The unit is BTC, with a hard cap of 21 million coins. New blocks of transactions are produced roughly every 10 minutes, and anyone in the world can send or receive value 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Bitcoin runs on a distributed ledger called the blockchain. Every transaction is verified and recorded by computers around the world, making the record extremely difficult to tamper with.

Because supply is fixed, Bitcoin resists the inflation that erodes fiat currencies, and cross-border transfers settle quickly at low cost. It is a new way to store and move value without intermediaries.

With growing institutional adoption, the launch of spot ETFs, and clearer regulation in many countries, Bitcoin is increasingly used both as an investment and as a means of payment. Long-term adoption is expected to continue.

In 2008, an individual using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, and the first block was mined in 2009. Through several halving events since, Bitcoin has grown into the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.