Bitcoin Settling $7.3B/Day In ‘Real’ Volume—How Do Visa, Mastercard Compare?

A report has revealed that Bitcoin is processing $7.3 billion per day in ‘true’ Transfer Volume. Here’s how this compares with traditional processors.

Bitcoin Volume Is Sitting At $7.3 Billion Per Day Right Now

In a new report in collaboration with the CME Group, the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has talked about how the Transfer Volume on the Bitcoin network has looked lately.

The “Transfer Volume” here refers to an indicator that keeps track of the total amount of the cryptocurrency that’s becoming involved in transactions on the blockchain.

Here is the chart shared in the report that shows the trend in this metric for BTC:

As displayed in the above graph, the daily Bitcoin Transfer Volume has stood at a whopping $48.7 billion recently. This value is larger than the $36.2 billion per day that Visa processes or the $26.7 billion per day that Mastercard does.

This volume, however, is unfiltered, meaning that it contains all the noise that comes with a cryptocurrency blockchain, like transfers between the wallets of the same investor.

The analytics firm has come up with an approach to mitigate this problem:

Glassnode has pioneered the application of advanced filtering heuristics, which allow for the assessment of whether on-chain transaction volumes are economical in nature, or internal transactions such as wallet management by exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.

The modified version of the indicator to account for this is called the Entity-Adjusted Volume. This metric only keeps track of the transfers happening between two separate ‘entities,’ where an entity is a cluster of addresses that belong to the same investor.

“Once this filtering is applied, the economic transfer volumes are closer to $7.3 billion per day, totalling $2.9T across 2024,” notes the report. This value is lesser than the volume being processed by the traditional payment processors, but is nonetheless impressive.

In the same report, Glassnode has also shared a zoomed out view of the Bitcoin “Realized Cap,” which measures the total value of the BTC supply by assuming that the value of each individual token is equal to the price at which it was last transacted on the blockchain.

In short, what this indicator represents is the total amount of capital that the investors as a whole have put into the cryptocurrency.

From the chart, it’s apparent that the BTC Realized Cap stood at $400 billion in November 2022, when the bear market reached its bottom. Since then, the metric has grown to a massive $872 billion. “This suggests that Bitcoin has since absorbed a staggering +$472B of fresh capital inflows during the current cycle,” says the analytics firm.

BTC Price

Bitcoin has seen a plunge of almost 3% in the past day as its price has come down to $101,000.