Cryptocurrency has pretty much become a billion-dollar industry. Venture capitalists are investing millions of dollars into bitcoin startups, websites are generating millions of dollars worth of sales and transactions on an international level have reached billions of dollars. Indeed, it’s a lucrative market.
A new report discovered that Blockchain.info web wallet users have transacted close to $20 billion in bitcoin. The website serves as one of the primary bitcoin outlets for users on the Internet and it now services more than 1.7 million users.
The figure was initially reported to be just over $3 billion, but, according to NewsBTC, there was a technical glitch in the website’s counter, which is why it showed up at a figure far less than the $19.6 billion.
“The current number is accurate. After our outage in May some auxiliary services needed to be reset before we could restore historical data. The $3 billion was accurate for the past few months. Which is pretty impressive,” said Blockchain CEO Nicolas Cary.
BitcoinWallet.com
Next up is BitcoinWallet.com; a website that made headlines after it was reported that the domain name was sold by Niko Younts for a quarter of a million of dollars. The website was launched two months ago and it is now reporting some interesting statistics that really depict how immense the bitcoin market is.
In its first 60 days in operation, the company has surpassed more than $1 million worth of bitcoin transactions and approximately 5,000 registered users have made roughly 23,000 transactions. One important fact gathered from the statistics is that a lot of its growth is coming from Africa, India and Indonesia.
“We have a growing density of users in developing regions where bitcoin offers convenience and cost advantages over traditional banking and remittance services,” said BitcoinWallet.com co-founder Price Givens. “In particular we see adoption of our service in Africa, Indonesia and India.”
However, China might be the next big market for the United States-based website.
These two figures outline just how big bitcoin is becoming. A report issued earlier this month found that bitcoin investments this year are actually outpacing of those made in the Internet a decade ago. Last month, bitcoin capital investments totaled $56 million, but the total number for the first six months of 2014 is $250.48 billion.
Here is what Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told one media outlet earlier this year:
“Like the Internet, Bitcoin is one of those things where it’s probably going to be hard — it’s either going to work or it’s not, but if it works it’s going to work at such scale it will be hard to make a venture investment too late,” said Andreessen. “Just like with the Internet there will be new ideas every step of the way, were going to watch and work. Help people as much as we can and place careful bets.”
Despite the positive figures coming out of bitcoin, the price is losing some of its gains it made over the past month. At the time of this writing, bitcoin is trading just under $570, down from its recent high of $650.
