In 2013, the Bitcoin overtook the (former) world’s largest remittance network Western Union’s value of daily transactions, recording an average daily transaction volume of US$257 million.
According to Coinometrics, institutional-level Bitcoin data and research firm, bitcoin was the 7th largest financial network in the world, just behind Paypal and Discover Network. Coinometrics provided Yahoo with this chart:
Two years ago, the average number of daily Bitcoin transactions was 80,000 per day, falling behind Western Union and PayPal which processed over 1 million transactions and payments per day.
Today, Bitcoin is close to overtaking PayPal and the Discover Network by daily transaction volume. According to data provided by Quandl, the estimated transaction volume of Bitcoin currently averages at around 200 million. However, earlier this year, the transaction volume of Bitcoin peaked close to 340 million, leveling PayPal’s average volume of 397 million.
“In the next one or two years, Bitcoin can surpass the dollar transaction volume of other established payment companies including Discover, and even American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” said SmartMetric CEO Chaya Hendrick.
The number of daily transactions in Bitcoin has also increased significantly since the beginning of the year, reaching close to 250,000 transactions per day. According to Blockchain.info, it has recorded a staggering growth rate of 40% since January 1, 2015.
Some startups including Coins.ph are already dominating the Southeast Asia region, recording substantially high daily volume and market dominance. The emergence of Bitcoin-based remittance platforms worldwide such as Cashila, Coins.ph and th, Rebit.ph and Bitspark is also expected to become a major factor in the surge of Bitcoin transactions over the next few months.