At a 15 month high having broken through the $11,000 barrier last week, Bitcoin continues to recover from its descent of last year and go from strength to strength. Just last week, a Cryptoslate report commented on one of the lesser known metrics of Bitcoin. The report states that with $13 billion being sent in BTC daily, the cryptocurrency is heading towards a figure of over $9 trillion sent in BTC this year.
Citing data from Blockchain.com, the Cryptoslate reports comments on the fact that it is not just the value of Bitcoin that is on the increase, but that every one of the BTC matrices is also on the rise, from its hash rate to the number of transactions per day, and, significantly, the transaction values. This demonstrates a steady increase in interest in Bitcoin as a means of transferring wealth as well as its utility as a currency that holds a value and can be traded or exchanged for products and services. However, it is the total fiat value sent using Bitcoin that is a very real sign of the market beginning to mature.
This metric was highlighted in a tweet last week by James McDowall, the Head of Strategy at Sentinel and the founder of CX. He also tweeted graphs showing that $9.26 trillion has been sent using Bitcoin since 1st January 2017, and showing the daily values that have been sent using Bitcoin. For example, a remarkable $16 billion plus was sent on June 21 alone. This $16 billion represents 337,741 transactions, which means that the average transaction value on that day was around $47,500.
It may be the case that these impressive metrics obscure the fact that a significant portion of this volume may well come from activities by traders such as wash trading. Furthermore, the transfers of monies sent may represent transfers between two or more different wallets belonging to the same user, so that the figures may not demonstrate as significant a rate of take-up as might be implied.
However, what is significant about this data is that it suggests that Bitcoin is being used for large value transfers. Not only is the cryptocurrency looking as if it is making its biggest rally to date, not only is it being used to store value, but the data also affirms Bitcoin’s increasing utility in the world of finance.
A further commentary released today in Cointelegraph points to Bitcoin having been profitable as an investment for 98.2% of the days since it was first created, the report citing data from holdcalc.com. The data shows that there were 69 unprofitable days since Bitcoin’s Genesis Block, and virtually all of these were in December 2017 and January 2018.
Check out Fintech.gi’s report on Bitcoin’s recent surge in value:
https://fintech.gi/bitcoin-and-other-cyrptocurrencies-surge-in-value/
