DataLight Research Suggests BTC Could Beat Visa & MasterCard

In 2017, the market took off and a huge flood of new investors got involved with the space. Despite the bear market, people are still excited about cryptocurrency and aim to see it grow more than any other asset, whether it is physical or digital.

Bitcoin is by far the most popular cryptocurrency (although you might disagree). This is firstly because it was the first token ever created but it also has a huge community of users and developers throughout the whole ecosystem.

According to a recent study conducted by DataLight, the majority lost 80 percent of their value during the almost everlasting bear market and that during this time, the number of transactions increased quite significantly. They also revealed that there isn’t necessarily a correlation between the price of Bitcoin and its acceptance or popularity among traders and users.

The study suggests that Bitcoin took over Visa in terms of its volume of transactions. However, DataLight decided to compare the results with other payment service providers like Mastercard and PayPal.

“In 2018 an average Bitcoin transaction volume was 450 times higher than Visa’s average, while the total of $3.4 trillion transferred with Bitcoin in 2018 is 5.8 times higher than such of PayPal… DataLight experts investigated Bitcoin as a payment system and compared it with the economic indicators of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal provided in their 2018 annual reports. The results are very surprising.”

The team noted that Bitcoin outperforms PayPal in transactions volume but it still lags behind Mastercard and Visa. That being said, in the future, Mastercard and Bitcoin could swap places.

They emphasise that their research claims Bitcoin is the better option for sending big amount of money:

“Bitcoin is many thousands of times ahead of the competition in this aspect. Its $40000 is 450 times larger than Visa’s. This tells us that the Bitcoin’s network is more suitable for larger, probably international payments… Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency ever and its code is still imperfect. However, with all of its imperfections it is still many hundred times faster than the existing wire transfers. Bitcoin’s fees are so small that you can transfer millions of dollars for a dozen cents. This is the reason many financial organizations find it so attractive.”

To finish off, the report ended with a positive outlook for the future, “In just 10 years, Bitcoin has managed to compete with the leaders of the payment system industry. Bitcoin’s development is occurring exponentially… If it maintains this pace, in another 10 years, it will surpass all competition.”