Bitcoin payment service provider Bitwala: Although competing coins attract attention, the transaction volume is still not increasing

Note: This article is an official blog post from Bitwala. The article only reflects the author's independent views and does not represent the position of this website.

The purpose of this article is not to criticize altcoins. Yes, there are many exciting projects with active communities working tirelessly on various cutting-edge blockchain projects and the fascinating world of cryptocurrency. But let's face it: no one is using altcoins. The altcoins here are tradable tokens issued by blockchain projects. These tokens are an economic incentive to increase the stability and resilience of the blockchain, because without tokens, the blockchain has no reason to exist. So, here I am referring to almost all the virtual currency projects listed on the CoinCap website.

Wow! We now accept over 40 altcoins!

A few weeks ago, we announced our partnership with Shapeshift, and we’re really excited about it. All of a sudden, we’re accepting over 40 altcoins! These include Ethereum, Dash, Monero, and many more. Some of these altcoins are not intended for payments at all, while others are trying to take over Bitcoin’s place through continued development.

But no one is using it

This is what happened after we added altcoins to our platform: No one was using them! We had heard similar things from other altcoin sites like BitcoinCommodities. Implementing altcoins is a lot of work, not to mention the subsequent promotion. We weren’t sure if our approach would work. We decided to keep working on it anyway. We got a lot of positive press and some encouragement, especially when we added Steem, Monero, and Dash. When we announced that we were accepting Dash, we saw at least 1,000 more users, which was very beneficial to our existing average traffic. We even earned $500 worth of Steem tokens after announcing Steem support (which we promised to donate to charity). Adding Monero trading later led to our highest engagement on our tweets that month.

These are just a few examples that show that our efforts were not in vain. We got clicks and news coverage, but there was one thing we didn’t get: transactions.

Here are some specific data:

Are you wondering how much altcoin volume we've had in the last two months? A little over 3 bitcoins, or about 2000块in USD. At the same time, we've had 200万美元in bitcoin volume on our site. That means altcoins only account for 0.1% of bitcoin volume. The fixed fee for each transaction is 0.5%, so if you do the math, you'll see. So we're still focusing on bitcoin. We're still accepting altcoins, but we're making it clear right now: Bitcoin is a big deal here.