Shiba Inu, Ether, and DOGE Are Slowly Eating Into Bitcoin's Multi-Billion Dollar Payments Sphere

Altcoins and stablecoins have downsized Bitcoin’s dominance as a means for paying for goods and services online by 27%. This is according to a new report released by Bloomberg, citing data from BitPay.

According to BitPay, Ether accounted for 15% of all global payments at merchant stores while stablecoins accounted for 13%. Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Litecoin each accounted for 3%. Bitcoin Cash accounted for 9-10% of all business-based BitPay transactions from August to December according to the BitPay report. USDC stablecoin accounted for between 1 to 2% during the same period.

The report shows that more and more merchants are finding stablecoins viable for holding and transferring value across borders, obviously because merchants want to reduce the volatility of the value over time. Stablecoins like the USDT are cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar or some other assets of relatively stable value to control the price from varying regularly as witnessed with other types of cryptocurrencies.

However, the report shows that more merchants who accept cryptocurrencies for payments for their goods and services also want to expose their money to volatility by holding or accepting a certain token whose price is anticipated to go up because they apparently benefit from this trend.

That explains why tokens like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin were chosen by many merchants for acceptance of payments for their goods and services. Dogecoin, for instance, surged 3,600% last year and earned a place among merchants willing to accept crypto for payments given the support it continues to receive from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Shiba Inu also became so popular online given the massive lobbying by the Shib Army although Shib’s popularity among merchants was also due to the many partnerships it sealed with online payment processors and other companies. It also got listed on a few significant crypto exchanges which also acted to boost its pricing positions.

Nevertheless, most merchants chose to accept payments and hold their value in Bitcoin given its strong dominance and in expectation of profits from bull runs – Bitcoin had two major bull runs last year.

As far as different industries are concerned, the largest cryptocurrency payment value is handled by prepaid/gift cards, Internet, VPN/hosting, computer games, precious metals, and consumer electronics industries.  

BitPay realized a 31% surge in transactions related to luxury goods last year from 9% in 2020. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Pair stated that Bitcoin was also spent on buying luxury goods including jewelry, watches, cars, boats, and gold.

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