Bitcoin (BTC) has continued to slowly recover from its brutal 56% drop from the all time high in December. The cryptocurrencies market cap now stands at US$195 billion, with over US$3.5 billion traded over the past 24 hours.
A key feature of BTC is the predictable deflationary monetary supply, which is supported by a dedicated user base which will hold their assets for an extended period of time. This controlled supply suggests that as demand increases, price will respond accordingly. As we enter 2018, BTC and other cryptocurrencies are gaining a foothold in the world’s lexicon, while the importance of the innovative utility becomes more widely understood.
Several components of commerce have begun to experiment with the benefits of using BTC as a currency, although Steam and Stripe have now dropped bitcoin payment citing fees and volatility. Both companies accepted bitcoin for high volume, low value transactions, and will continue to assess bitcoin as a payment option.
These payments will likely be relegated to the Lightning Network (LN) in the future, a time-locked, bidirectional payment channel allowing for nearly free transactions. WooCommerce has already shown a working LN channel, although LN solutions remain in alpha during further development and testing
Larger transactions, however, such as real estate sales in Miami and New York, student tuition, and even lawyers fees continue to be paid in BTC. A montessori school in New York has even positioned BTC and Ethereum with other cash or debit transactions, and does not accept credit cards.
These transactions bring additional demand pressures, with use cases beyond that of speculation. While these transactions represent a small percentage of BTC volume, expect adoption to quickly increase alongside cryptocurrency understanding in mainstream circles.
Further demand will come from on-ramps being enabled for new users. Robinhood recently announced a crypto addition to their retail stock app. Nearly one million users have signed up for early access. Resident in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire will have access in February. A similar competing app through Circle has yet to open for retail users, while Square’s Cash App quietly enabled bitcoin purchasing for more users this week.
The global leader in retail bitcoin trading, Coinbase, announced a partnership with Trading Technologies this week. The partnership enables thousands of institutional clients to trade the crypto spot market side by side with 45 other markets.
As on-ramps continue to come online, the BTC network has continued to hum along. More transactions are currently leaving the mempool than entering, substantially decreasing pending transactions.