Recently, we stumbled upon a report about the use of Bitcoin (you can read more about the study here) which made a few headlines in the media stating that ‘almost nobody uses it’.

It suggests that only 1.3% of all bitcoin transactions account for payments made to merchants. But if you start crunching the numbers, they don’t seem to add up. We at CoinGate also compared the numbers with our data to show you why we doubt the accuracy of this report.

According to data retrieved from Blockchain.com, there were 290,287 bitcoin transactions per day on average in the last 12 months. It means that this 1.3% would account for 3,774 transactions per day that were made for paying for goods and services.

CoinGate processes more than 1,000 of such Bitcoin transactions per day on average. Now, if we’d assume that the report presents accurate data, that would mean that 26.5% of all merchant related transactions go through us, which would be way off the track.

What about BitPay, or CoinPayments? For example, at the beginning of the year, BitPay stated that they had processed more than $1 billion worth of transactions last year with an average cart size of $678.77. This means that in a year, they processed around 1,473,250 transactions or 4,036 transactions per day. Even this number is already more than 1.3% that is presented in the report.

And we are not even mentioning all those stores that accept Bitcoin directly to their wallets, or via open-source software like BTCPay.

It’s not that we want to throw shade on the company that published this report. We’re just concerned that it spreads a false message that cryptocurrencies are all about speculation.