Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The leading digital currency Bitcoin hasn’t returned to the values it enjoyed early last year, but it appears to have rebounded from the beating it—and the cryptocurrency industry as a whole—took in the wake of the sudden collapse in November of the major trading platform FTX.com and the bankruptcy in July of crypto lender Celsius.
Bitcoin was trading at just over $25,000 early Monday, a sharp rise from the $15,000 region it had plummeted to as news broke of FTX’s legal issues and subsequent bankruptcy. The current price is also at the highest level the cryptocurrency has reached since June. Its total market capitalization, now at a bit more than $480 billion, slightly exceeds that of payments giant Visa Inc., points out Cointelegraph, an online news source that follows crypto valuations.
Bitcoin’s market cap first topped that of Visa in December 2020 and then again, very briefly, early in October, according to Cointelegraph’s analysis.
But Bitcoin, and the crypto industry as a whole, still face strong headwinds. The major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is leaking revenue, according to a report Friday by Coindesk.com, a crypto news source. The company has already said its revenue for 2022 will likely be half, at best, of what it took in in 2021. Analyst estimates indicate a 61% drop from 2021, Coinbase reported, to $3.1 billion.
At the same time, crypto apps are apparently losing their allure among users. Downloads of trading apps from the App Store and Google Play, along with direct downloads from crypto trading platforms, have been plummeting steadily for months, according to numbers data.ai, an app-tracking firm, reported in December.
But not all payments players are shying away from partnerships that leverage crypto for consumer payments to merchants. These projects lately have focused on e-commerce. One of the latest ventures involves the processor ACI Worldwide Inc., which late last year said it would support payments in at least 127 digital currencies for e-commerce merchants using Vendo Services, a payments service provider based in Switzerland that links to merchants worldwide. ACI said it will rely on Rocketfuel Blockchain Inc., a San Francisco-based platform that enables payments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
