The valuation of all combined cryptocurrencies surpassed the market capitalization of the leading Visa financial services provider , in 30 billion dollars.
At the time of writing, Visa's market capitalization was just above $ 254 billion, while the market value of the cryptocurrency market as a whole was $ 285 billion. , $ 9 billion.
The visa market against cryptocurrency in figures
According to the Visa 2016 annual report, the Visa network processes approximately $ 5.8 trillion worth of transactions per year, primarily from the $ 3.1 billion debit and credit cards issued worldwide. More than 83.2 billion transactions were settled on the Visa network in 2016.
In contrast, the cryptocurrency market regulates far fewer transactions on a daily basis. The Ethereum network regulates more transactions than all crypto-currencies in the combined market, and the entire cryptocurrency market processes about 1 million transactions per day. That's 30 million transactions per month and about 360 million transactions a year.
However, the main developers of most public blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are working on the development and deployment of second-tier payment networks. The use of second-tier payment channels like Lightning and Plasma will allow crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to remain a secure stock of values, while payment channels will work like the Visa network and will be launched in addition cryptocurrences.
A recent research paper by Blockstream's research team entitled "Scalable Financing of Bitcoin Micropayment Channel Networks" revealed that: with necessary solutions such as micropayment channels can support at least 800 million users with the current infrastructure.
"Micropayment channel networks create new problems, which have not been solved in original documents [8,18] We identify two main challenges – blockchain capacity and locked-in funds. Even with the increase in block size, it was estimated that blockchain capacity could only support about 800 million users with micropayment channels because of the number of chain transactions needed to open and close channels, "he wrote.
With the optimization of micropayment channels through the elimination of unnecessary channels and information, the Blockstream research paper noted that nearly 96% of blockchain space, increasing considerably the capacity of the transactions and the number of users. ]
"By hiding the channels of the block chain, we obtain a reduction in the use of the chain space and thus the cost of the channels." For a group of 20 nodes with 100 channels between them, this can save up to 96% of blockchain space, "the newspaper adds.
Already, in terms of the volume of daily transactions, the cryptocurrency market processes more than $ 10 billion worth of transactions daily, from cryptocurrency to fiat and vice versa. The global market of cryptocurrency trading treats $ 3.6 trillion of transactions on an annual basis, which is closer to the volume of the Visa network. It is fair to compare the volume of cryptocurrency transactions with the Visa network, since both markets deal with transactions between hundreds of digital and government fiduciary currencies.
In the long run, the cryptocurrency transaction volume may exceed that of Visa, if scaling chain and off-line solutions are implemented on the major public blockchains.
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