Bitcoin Transactions Nearing VISA Levels

Bitcoin is currently in a bear market and with it has come doubters and negative perceptions. But there are some positive aspects as focus moves away from simply price. Currently, the famous crypto is handling more transaction volume than PayPal. And if that was not enough, it is getting close to VISA, very fast.

Bitcoin Transaction Volume Grows

In 2018, Bitcoin transacted $1.3 trillion dollars. This is a great number, considering that Bitcoin is in a bear market since December 2017. The information has been released by Yassine Elmandjra, a cryptoanalyst at ARK Invest.

In a series of Tweets, he wrote that Bitcoin is just an order of magnitude away from Visa.

He wrote about it:

“Look at the transaction *value*, NOT the transaction *volume*. $3-4 B worth of bitcoin has been transacted daily in the last year. At ~ $1.3T annually, Bitcoin’s base layer transactional value is within an order of magnitude away from Visa’s.”

Visa handled $8.9 trillion dollars back in 2016. Bitcoin seems to be far from it, at least at the moment, in terms of transaction value. But since 2015, Bitcoin experienced an important growth rate each year. If the current trajectory keeps – 80.17 percent increase per year – Bitcoin would overtake Visa in 2022. By that time, it should be handling over $13 trillion dollars in payments.

Some experts believe that Bitcoin shouldn’t be used for day to day transactions. For them, Bitcoin should exclusively be used for bigger transactions.

Elmandjra said that Bitcoin was ‘never supposed’ to reach such important levels of transactions. With the so-called Lightning Network, Bitcoin is trying to solve its scalability issues. In this way, the number of transactions would increase substantially. The Lightning Network has very low fees and fast transactions.

Bitcoin is currently being traded close to $6,900 dollars and has a market capitalization of $125 billion dollars.