Coin Dance Records Php 36 Million Worth of BTC Transactions

As of press time, the bitcoin’s value vs the pesos solidifies around the Php 860,000 mark. However, that doesn’t mean that interest for cryptocurrency is waning.

Bitcoin Trade Rises

Bitcoin trading quadruples in the Philippines. That’s according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Deputy Director Melchor Plabasan mentioned that bitcoin transactions rose to $8.8 million dollars, up from $6 million in 2016 and $2 million in 2015. This is an updated data since previous reports only mentioned data for bitcoin transactions up to 2016.

New Virtual Currency Exchange Applications

Plabasan also mentioned that there are 12 virtual coin exchanges applying for a license presently in the Philippines. 8 of which are completing requirements while the others have successfully presented their business models.

Evidence of Rising Bitcoin Awareness

One does not need to look further.

Coins and SCI Ventures

Coins.ph and SCI Ventures, the only licensed virtual currency exchange platforms at the moment are seeing double-digit transactions and user growth. They are currently looking for ways to ease transaction fees and ways to handle the current demand.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a popular software that tells you the search interest of a given keyword over a certain period of time. This is how it currently looks like for “bitcoin”:

Also, you can check out which cities and regions in the Philippines have a high search interest for “bitcoin” in this article.

Coin Dance

Local Bitcoins.com is a website that connects bitcoin buyers and users. The bitcoin transactions for the week of December 9, 2017 is worth Php 36 million according to the website Coin Dance:

This verifies BSP’s statement on the rapidly increasing awareness with bitcoin. But we think awareness cannot be attributed to increasing number of transactions alone. We are not sure how many people are attributed to the transactions recorded by Coin Dance.

Overall

Bitcoin is highly volatile, despite the current rising prices. As the BSP evaluates more virtual exchange platforms, more and more people will be aware of cryptocurrency in the coming months. Although, instead of mere warnings about cryptocurrency, we think it will be better if there are more means to share knowledge about in the country. One step is of course, through our Bitcoin Blog – Bitpinas. The other is a learning centre, which will be launched by Appsolutely and NEM next year.