Crypto Payments Are Growing Beyond Just Bitcoin

January 21, 2022 12:38 pm Comments

As the crypto industry continues to expand and gain more awareness in the mainstream, reports are showing that Bitcoin is starting to lose it’s dominance as the preferred payment of choice.

Bitpay is a platform that allows merchants to accept cryptocurrencies as a payment method in a point of sale and also provides services that enable the use of Mastercard debit cards which enable customers to spend cryptocurrencies at a large list of retailers.

The company states that the data is starting to show that nearly 33% of all payments are actually transacted using other alternative cryptocurrencies such as ether, stable coins, and a variety of other alternative coins.

Ethereum particularly is very popular behind Bitcoin as it accounts for nearly 15% of all payments performed on the platform.

Stable coins have been increasing in popularity as well which includes the two most popular stable coins USDC and Tether which together account for 13% of all payments on Bitpay.

Pymnts.com reports:

Stablecoins like tether, or USDT, and Circle’s USD Coin, also known as USDC, are closing fast, representing 13% of the payments run through BitPay, Bloomberg reported.

The remaining 3% comes from a trio of smaller cryptocurrencies BitPay began supporting in 2021: early bitcoin competitor litecoin (LTC), Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s favorite dogecoin, or DOGE, and its spinoff shiba inu, or SHIB.

That’s down from 92% bitcoin in 2020, BitPay Chief Executive Officer Stephen Pair said.

He attributed the gain partly to the growing use of stablecoins for business-to-business payments across international borders.

That said, the use of ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, has grown dramatically since it gained a higher profile in 2021 with the boom in decentralized finance, or DeFi, and NFT projects.

Most of those live on the Ethereum blockchain, and their transactions are made with ether. The $69 million NFT collage sold at auction by Christie’s last year was priced in ether, for example.

With that being said, the overall volume of crypto payments in general is increasing as the total volume of payments that Bitpay did in 2021 increased by 51% compared to the previous year.

This increase in volume can be attributed to either the continued growth of the industry in general or the rise of many of the values of cryptocurrencies last year.

Currently, Bitpay is recognized as one of the most popular crypto payment companies although it is still considered small compared to payment giants like Paypal and Visa.

The company will likely need further innovation to maintain its growth and maintain its competitive edge in the space as traditional payment companies like Paypal and Visa are stepping into the crypto world as well.

In regards to Bitcoin losing dominance as a payment method, the data shows that people are more likely to hold Bitcoin instead of spending it.

Globalonlinemony shares:

Bitcoin’s use as digital funds foreign money has dwindled since 2020. This was the conclusion that Bitpay, one of many main cryptocurrency-based fee processors, had when reviewing the numbers the market left them final yr.

Bitpay instructed Bloomberg that the dominance of bitcoin for purchases in its platform went down from 93% throughout 2020, to 65% in 2021.

This lack of virtually a 3rd of its dominance has to do with the doorway of different currencies into the fee area.

Market history shows that the value of the dominant coin continues to be on a upward trend year after year and that purchases made with crypto are often on items such as jewelry, watches, cars, and other luxury goods.

It is expected for Bitcoin to continue to be lose dominance in the payment transactions space as more and more alternatives emerge in the future with lower transaction fees.

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