Bitcoin giant Coinbase releases first half Bitcoin development report

2015 is already halfway through, and it is time for us to review the development trend of Bitcoin over the past six months.

• price

Although Bitcoin has lost 9% of its value since the beginning of the year (July 13), it is still 213% higher than it was two years ago at $288/coin. As can be seen from the following picture, after experiencing several Bitcoin bubbles, the price of Bitcoin has gradually stabilized.

• Floatability

At the same time, as Bitcoin exchanges and Bitcoin infrastructure continue to improve, more and more institutional investors have joined in Bitcoin investment, making the volatility of this market decrease year by year.

• Bitcoin Wallet

More and more people are beginning to accept Bitcoin as a digital currency. There are currently between 5 and 10 million Bitcoin holders worldwide, of which 2.4 million are on CoinBase.

• Number of transactions

The number of daily transactions in the Bitcoin market has grown significantly. In June 2014, there were about 60,000 Bitcoin transactions per day. Today, this number has doubled to 120,000.

• User composition

Globalization is an important attribute of Bitcoin. In the past six months, we have seen a significant increase in Bitcoin users outside the United States. 47% of Coinbase users are now from non-US countries, with the most significant growth in Hong Kong, Tanzania, the Philippines, Romania and Algeria.

In addition, we also found that in addition to young users, more and more middle-aged and elderly users are beginning to join the Bitcoin wave, and about 34% of CoinBase users are over 35 years old.

• Developer Ecosystem

In the first half of 2015, the developer ecosystem of Bitcoin has been significantly improved. Currently, there are more than 7,000 applications on CoinBase that are serving Bitcoin, among which applications such as ChangeTip, Lawnmower, and Zapchain have received very high attention. (For details, please click on the app gallery)

In addition to the above apps, we have also seen many companies that are optimistic about Bitcoin recently release beta versions of their products. Among them, the products that impressed us most are: 21, Abra, Blockstream, Streamium and Augur.

Payment providers such as Stripe and Braintree have also begun to incorporate Bitcoin into their payment systems.

On Github, there are more than 6,000 Bitcoin code repositories, while the well-known payment platform Paypal has only 2,300.

Expectations for the second half of the year

Although the price of Bitcoin will fluctuate significantly in the short term, we remain very optimistic about the future of Bitcoin. We still believe that Bitcoin will provide more people with more global, safer and more inclusive electronic currency services. And talented developers will also work hard to make Bitcoin an open and global payment platform, bringing more vitality to the Bitcoin ecosystem.