Chainalysis: Bitcoin merchant payments down almost 80% this year

According to a Chainalysis study cited by Reuters, the value of bitcoins handled by bitcoin payment processors has dropped nearly 80% from $427M in December 2017 to $96M in September 2018. Chainalysis surveyed 17 payment processors, including BitPay.

While merchant payments may be down, Bitcoin's scalability solutions are showing positive signs. The Lightning Network, a second layer solution designed to address Bitcoin's scalability problem, reached a new record this week. The network has onboarded over 4,100 nodes with a capacity of nearly $1.9M, according to data from 1ML. (Source: Reuters)