The use of Bitcoin is growing among merchants. Coinbase and Bitpay data

Although the adoption of bitcoins follows a very slow pace, there is still growth sustained by merchants, regardless of market declines.

According to BitPay CMO, Bill Zielke, that payment processor facilitated cryptocurrency transactions worth $ 1 billion in 2019, with bitcoin leading the group.

Likewise, a Coinbase spokesman said Coinbase Commerce has processed $ 135 million in cryptocurrency payments for thousands of merchants in 2019, which represents a 600% increase in the number of unique transactions through Coinbase Commerce since 2018.

Slow but growing pace

Ether and other stablecoins make up a small percentage of both of the above totals, according to Chainalysis, which estimates a value of bitcoin currency transactions via payment processors of around $ 4 billion in 2019.

Obviously, the number of credit card payments is much higher, with a volume of purchases in 2018 of 3.7 trillion dollars, according to a 2019 report by the US Consumer Protection Office.

Among consumer-facing companies, Fold CEO Will Reeves said his shopping app processed over 2,000 purchases during the Christmas shopping season of 2019, of which 80% were Lightning Network transactions. "Amazon, Starbucks, Sephora were the most popular brands by lightning users," said Reeves.

Another option for merchants also emerged on the scene last week. This is Strike, a Zap application that allows users to make payments in USD through the Lightning Network.

Tales from the cash register

All things considered, there is a real reason to be cautiously optimistic about the use of bitcoins in 2020, in addition to speculative trading. However, the owner of the Lola Luna boutique Jean-Michel Daumas, a Coinbase Commerce customer who runs a luxury lingerie business in Paris, warned that it is still too early to describe bitcoin payments as routine or trendy.

Daumas said his boutique has received more than 90 bitcoin payments since the beginning of 2018, never more than four per month. Its customers are 80% men who spend bitcoin in lingerie as a status symbol, an intuition that aligns with BitPay's discoveries that jewelery, precious metals and high-end technological products collect the largest number of buyers in bitcoin.

Perhaps some customers choose to pay with bitcoin to maintain greater confidentiality on their purchases. But given the French lingerie culture, Daumas said it's "too early" to conclude why some buyers prefer to use bitcoin.

Looking at a wider context, BitPay's Zielke said that Europe and the Middle East generally host the most valuable business transactions, while there are more North American buyers in terms of unique transactions.

In the meantime, Daumas simply prefers to transfer bitcoin earnings to a hardware wallet and hodl.