How Many Businesses Adopted Bitcoin In 2017?

The entire ‘cryptomania’ has begun in the beginning of 2017, when Bitcoin started to grow and businesses considered it as a new and groundbreaking technology that they could adopt. By September, there were around 10,000 businesses adopting Bitcoin, with about 10% of them being brick and mortar ones that accept Bitcoin as a payment method.

After September, the price of Bitcoin was coming close to the $5k mark and increased by 75% which made even more businesses consider embracing Bitcoin as a payment method. In Q3, there was a sudden increase unlike any previous quarters, led by the increase in price that took place before.

On top of that, the media covered the astronomical returns on Bitcoin that the investors were receiving, leading the people in a new crypto revolution and educating them about its massive potential. On October 3rd, 2017, there were more than 11,000 businesses accepting Bitcoin which marked a new (12.4%) increase from the beginning of the quarter.

However, all of this can fall to water when we see the last quarter, where the Bitcoin had the largest increase from businesses. With a price of $4,317 at the start of Q4 and a price close to $20,000 around December 17th, Bitcoin was present in more than 14,000 brick and mortar establishments. Even though the price of Bitcoin corrected and dropped to $14,000 soon after that, Bitcoin’s price rose around 224% in a single quarter.

From all this, we can say that the second half of 2017 was the peak time for accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. The price which rose from $979 on January 1st to more than $13,000 on December 31st also plays a big factor in this growing trend.

The growth of this acceptance will likely continue in the first quarter (Q1) of 2018, where we should expect more and more businesses to tune in and embrace Bitcoin as a payment method – but also embrace blockchain as a technology that fuels their digital infrastructure.