2020-2-3 20:19 |
While the adoption of Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions may be moving at a slow pace, the use of the coin among the merchants soared last year, CoinDesk reports.
BitPay, the cryptocurrency payment processor, processed an equivalent of about $1 billion worth of crypto transactions last year with Bitcoin transactions dominating the transactions, Bill Zielke, the firm’s CMO revealed.similarly, Coinbase Commerce facilitated about $135 million of crypto transaction for numerous merchants last year. This was a 600% rise in the volume of crypto transactions through Coinbase Commerce from 2018.
Stablecoins led by Ether took up just a fraction of the the two mentioned transaction totals. Meanwhile, according to Chainalysis, slightly over $4 billion worth of Bitcoin was transacted via payment processors last year. In this case, CoinBase is aggressively pushing for an increase of its merchant transactions this year.
Despite the rise in the volume of Bitcoin transactions among merchants, it is still very low compared to credit card purchases. Credit card purchases were worth $3.7 trillion in 2018 as per the U.S. Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection report .
The Bitcoin transaction volumes were also contributed by consumer facing firms. Will Reeves, Fold CEO, revealed that the firm facilitated over 2,000 purchases last year during the holiday shopping season. Reeves also stated that more than 80 percent of the total transactions were through Lightning Network. Reeves stated that Starbucks, Amazon as well as Sephora witnessed the highest transactions among the lightning users.
There have been fresh options for merchants, last week Zap introduced Strike, which is an app that allows users to pay using the US dollar through the lightning network.
Payments using cryptos are gaining traction among the merchants with some citing security as the main attraction. According to Jean-Michel Daumas, the proprietor of Lola Luna Boutique, crypto payments are more secure compared to other payment methods like PayPal since clients can lie and say they didn't receive their orders and get their money back. Lona Lula took in about 90 Bitcoin in payments last year.
Similar to Notcoin - Blum - Airdrops In 2024