Bitcoin payment volume picked up steam last year even during one of the asset’s worst bear market years. In 2018, bitcoin had six times more transactional volume than mainstream giant PayPal.
This. This is some of the most uplifting BTC news that we’ve had in recent months. According to Satoshi Capital Research, Bitcoin transactions totalled over 3.3 trillion dollars sent using the popular blockchain. This, in and of itself, is an absolutely incredible feat, but it is even more exciting because they also reported that that total was over 6x greater than the total that mainstream payment company, Paypal, reported for 2018.
Seen here:
Over $3.3 trillion was sent using #bitcoin in 2018, more than 6x the volume sent using Paypal.
BTC is not just a serious global currency, but a serious global payment system as well. pic.twitter.com/o4Tb2EFUUw
— Satoshi Capital Research (@chartingbitcoin) January 22, 2019
Unfortunately, Bitcoin saw a downturn in their total transaction volume from 2017, which finished at 3.7 trillion among skyrocketing prices. While this would normally be unfortunate news, the fact that Bitcoin saw such a relatively small downtick among the currently devastating bear market is a breath of fresh air among falling prices and disappointment from investors and enthusiasts alike.
However, Bitcoin still has a ways to go to overtake conventional modes of payment, like Visa, who reported over 10.2 trillion in dollars sent across 2018. While this volume may seem a ways off for the crypto community, we continually see more and more adoption and use as support from online and location-based businesses increases. Despite falling so far behind Visa in their transaction volume, Bitcoin still placed at 5th place in equity movement for 2018, leading far above the 6th place entity, Paypal. Despite all of these high rankings, Bitcoin’s transaction rate is still far lower than Visa, at a parsley 3 transactions per minute, as opposed to the 1700 transactions serviced every minute by Visa.
According to Satoshi Capital Research, only Visa, Alipay, Wechat pay, and Mastercard led Bitcoin’s trading volume in 2018.
Bitcoin also held significant standings as an equity movement tool, with Satoshi Capital Research reporting that bitcoin had a 2.2 trillion dollar trading volume. Interestingly, the Baht, Shekel, and Peruvian Peso led Bitcoin by a small amount in volume.
