Bitcoin: Is BTC Adoption From a Payments Perspective, a Pipedream?

It is difficult to argue for or against the status of Bitcoin’s adoption. Do more people know about Bitcoin over the past few years? Yes, they certainly do but the idea of Bitcoin, how it was initially imagined, largely differs from what it is to the current financial industry. The change in idolization has permeated into its adoption path as well.

As BTC was originally introduced, it was intended to eliminate the involvement of third-party and act as a medium of exchange or transaction. However, the improved narrative of Bitcoin as a Store-of -value has now taken over the argument.

Glassnode statistics recently revealed a dataset that revealed that the percent of Bitcoin supply held by entities with balances under 1 BTC was extremely less.

Only 0.89 percent of addresses held between 0.01 and 0.1 BTC and 0.15 percent of addresses held between 0.001-0.01 BTC. In comparison, if you combine the number of entities holding between 1-10,000 BTC, the total would be close to 60 percent of the address. 22.09 percent kept between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC alone.

It was obvious that users rarely used Bitcoin for a small transaction, and their ideology of BTC as a SoV was much more evident than BTC as a Medium Exchange (MoE).

Hence, it is a plausible argument that Bitcoin being adopted from an MoE perspective is largely diminishing in the industry.

Is Self-Custody of Bitcoin dead?

Now, the above data also inclines towards the fact that more and more users were storing their assets in centralized platforms. Although Bitcoin was supposed to attain the idea of a decentralized form of capital, the “trustlessness factor” of crypto exchanges continued to lure users into their platforms.

Certain Decentralized Exchanges or DEXs have made an entrance in the past few years but they have hardly garnered the same enthusiasm from the users, storing their assets in centralized exchanges.

However, 2020 has been observing a change in that aspect as more and more people have taken their BTC assets out of exchanges. As of today, Bitcoin on Exchanges has greatly reduced since registering a high in 2020.

Recent reports also suggested that Shapeshift, a self-custody platform is launching a mobile trading app for iOS and Android users to purchase and seek crypto assets without disclosing their private keys to a third party.

Hence, in spite of the growth witnessed by centralized exchanges, the Self-custody of Bitcoin is still evident in some users, which falls right into the primary ethos of Bitcoin.