PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and many others started to pave the way for cryptocurrency. It was to get used as one payment tool to buy everyday essential goods. The market of crypto grew beyond the expectations of many people in the last decade. This nascent industry managed to change the mainstream perception. It was last year. It saw various traditional financial institutions adopt cryptocurrency in one form or another. Few of the biggest public firms have begun to use Bitcoin as one treasury hedge. It was such as MicroStrategy. PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard made way for the common public to make use of crypto as a payment form. Also trade cryptos, stable coins, and other coins on the most trusted platform BitQZ
A lot of experts are still now skeptical about the use of cryptocurrency as a payment form. It was considering its price volatility, current market trends along with data. They indicated that cryptocurrency is got used to buying items for daily use. There was a recent report from a provider of fintech payment infrastructure. The name was checkout.com. It surveyed 33000 business leaders. It got revealed that there is an increase in the interest of the consumer to pay in crypto. This report indicated that 40 percent of consumers aged 18-35 years wish and plan to make use of cryptos for paying for services or goods within the upcoming year. It is up from below 30 percent in 2021.
This rise in digital payment helped by the pandemic COVID-19 made it easier for cryptocurrency to turn out to be more mainstream. People became hugely familiar with payments via QR codes. It makes it easier for any mainstream payment processor like MasterCard and Visa to introduce cryptocurrency payments on their network without building any separate infrastructure.
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Cryptocurrency payment networks are increasing along with public interest
As per a report from Visa, their network processed more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency transactions in last year’s first quarter. It increased to $2.5 billion by this year’s first quarter. This report highlighted that cryptocurrency payments became very popular with the increase in stablecoin payments use.
MasterCard partnered with USDC or USD Coin stablecoin user Circle. It was for facilitating payment options that are crypto-based for many users. With the increase in crypto-linked debit cards, Nexo came up with its cryptocurrency collateralized credit card in association with MasterCard. They issued around 55000 cards since their launch in April. It can get used by almost 92 million merchants globally. It will let investors spend 90 percent of their crypto’s fiat value.
Various analysts too like pointing to the rise in the adoption of stablecoin as a major metric of cryptocurrency payments.
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Cryptocurrency payments similarly favorable for merchants and consumers
The crypto payment’s infrastructure side saw huge growth. It will never have been possible without merchants’ willingness to accept it. Many surveys along with reports highlighted that merchants got benefited the same way from the integration of crypto payment regardless of the complexities and technical barriers.
Another report from PYMNTS also highlighted that over 75 percent of US customers are in search of making use of crypto as a payment form this year. 85 percent of businesses with more than $1 billion in yearly sales have integrated crypto payments for gaining a lot of customers. Other merchants said that their transactions overseas increased. They found a new customer base after the integration of crypto payment.
The primary reasons that merchants listed for adopting crypto payments include major cuts in costs of the transaction, middlemen elimination, and onboarding of new customer bases worldwide. Stablecoin forms a major chunk of consumers’ expenditures. Yet a lot of analysts point toward the main growth of layer-2 networks in the last year. For instance, the Lightning Network, which is the second layer on Bitcoin’s top, saw huge growth in the last year. The capacity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network increased past 4000 Bitcoin and first broke the barrier of 1000 Bitcoin in 2020 August and the Bitcoin barrier of 2000 in 2021 July. The capacity doubled in the area of 18 months.
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Conclusion
The popularity of crypto payment depends on the total adoption of crypto. The more people become aware of and have an understanding of the nascent financial asset class, the more people will be adopting it. This has been proved by many studies of late. The crypto’s volatility aspect can be further dialed down by allowing them to get converted into stablecoins.