Cryptocurrency purchases exploded in 2022 despite the bear market

The year 2022 and its string of scandals have raised fears of diminished use of cryptocurrencies. But when it comes to purchases of goods and services, that has not been the case, according to the latest report from CoinGate. Cryptocurrencies have never been used so much in this context.

Cryptocurrency purchases exploded in 2022

Payments facilitator CoinGate’s report shows that cryptocurrency purchases have continued to grow strongly since 2017. While customers made 312,500 purchases per year on average, that figure soared to 927,294 over the course of the year. 2022. This is particularly notable, because during the last “crypto winter” in 2020, this share had stopped growing:

Progression of the number of cryptocurrency purchases for each year

What this means is that the particularly gloomy atmosphere that dominated 2022 was not enough to cancel the attraction for these still relatively new payment methods. This, therefore, testifies to a fundamental consolidation of the sector  :

This corresponds to a payment processed by CoinGate every 34 seconds. It’s impressive […] and it shows that bleeding markets don’t necessarily prevent people from making a lot of purchases.  

In total, the number of cryptocurrency purchases increased by +60% in 2022. According to the report, VPN, VPS, and hosting providers saw the most purchases.

Bitcoin continues to reign supreme

Nearly half of these purchases were made in Bitcoin (48%), even if this share is tending to fall in favor of altcoins. USDT is the second most used cryptocurrency (14%), followed by Ether (10%). The report notes the rise of the Tether stablecoin, which suggests that this type of cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly prominent.

On the merchant side, CoinGate is also seeing renewed interest. The number of registered entities jumped by +48% in 2022. This is partly due to the fact that payments are transferred to fiat instantly, which allows service providers to not have to worry about price volatility, which has been very important this year.

Hence a particularly optimistic conclusion from CoinGate:

Growth in adoption of cryptocurrency payments is not slowing down, but it is actually accelerating.  

This report is of course only based on a payments manager, but it does indeed suggest that payments are a sector little affected by the bear market. This is also what seemed to emerge from the year 2022: the markets suffered, but the underlying interest fell less than expected.