Payments made using the XRP cryptocurrency surged by 42% last year, according to a new Bitpay report.
The ‘2023 Decrypted’ research has revealed that spending among the XRP community rallied with a notable increase in spending volume, recording a total of 7,310 transactions.
Despite this, Bitcoin remained the king of crypto payments, with 296,689 recorded transactions followed by Litecoin (213,647 transactions) before a steep drop to Ether in third with 81,619 transactions.
The report noted that more than ever a variety of chains had been used to make payments including the likes of Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Polygon among others.
Crypto payments occurred in 175 countries, yet it was spenders in the US that made more payments than any other country. According to Bitpay, companies across 110 industries accepted crypto payments while the most popular industries for the payment method include ‘Precious Metals’, ‘Sports’, ‘VPN/Hosting’, ‘Retail’ and ‘Luxury, Goods & Jewellery’.
Bitpay works by partnering with popular wallets such as Coinbase, Exodus, Metamask, Electrum and Trust, and then allowing customers to pay via the wallets in a range of currencies. To make a payment using cryptocurrency, users need to have a wallet application which can be installed on a computer or mobile device and act as an interface for accessing the asset. The wallet doesn’t actually store crypto, however but instead holds the keys the owner needs to access them.
With Bitpay some merchants may use email billing in place of a checkout experience. In these cases, the customer is emailed an invoice from which they can complete their transaction.
