Bitsoko Bitcoin and Ethereum Research
By Bitsoko
General industry overview
Bitcoin interest and uptake in Africa in relation to the rest of the World.Nairobi Lagos and cape town leading the charge in sub saharan Africa According to local bitcoin Kenya has slightly over 1000 traders
Nigeria has 4500 traders lagos leading the charge followed by Port Harcourt. South Africa has some 3700 traders . In south Africa Bitcoin use by volume johannesburg and durban follows by number of users. In southafrica most people are paying using bank transfers, in some instance also available for ETF with volumes over $102237.39
Interest in Kenya
Search Volume
Traded Volume
Volume in Nairobi hit an all time high of Khs 15 Million a week, this is the higest ever recorded. Based on google search Number of Kenyans searching for bitcoin in Kenya is on the rise shown by the line graph above .
Interest in Nigeria
Search volume
Traded volume
Build up towards December then slowly burned out over the coming months Average weekly volume in the Nigerian market stands at $2211769.00 a week The line graph above shows search interest in and the graph below shows average weekly transaction in Nigeria
Interest in South Africa
We are seeing a slow and steady rise in the number of people interested in Bitcoin in South Africa More and more south Africans are buying bitcoin Average weekly volume in south africa stands at $457202
Block details
Having a look at Bitcoins Doctors report all is not well With increasing costs per transaction and longer payment time is a signal Bitcoin is reaching its Network capacity.
We have a combination of the following Average block size is on the rise, this means blocks are coming out relatively full, Transactions per block is in the rise as a result the average transaction time is on the rise this explains why there is a lot of pain and money comes with using Bitcoin, network and a number of proposals have been put forward attempting to scale the network namely Bitcoin unlimited and segwit, both gaining popularity among various community members with Miners signalling support for both raises risk of a potential Bitcoin split. Experts (Including) Bitsoko thinks this is a potential risk for Bitcoin
Number of transactions sitting in the mempool continue to rise with April seeing pending transaction shoot to 35 Million transactions this explains why the cost per transaction and mining revenue is on the rise i actually tried this myself and it took me well over one hour 20 min to confirm a transaction. When it comes to business that becomes unbearable, the merchant can’t wait for more than an hour to confirm a transaction. This is where ethereum comes in handy with transaction time around 1 min
Average transaction fee on the Bitcoin network stands at $0.841
So what does this mean ?
When segwit is activated it will lay the foundation for the lightening network which will have a throughput of over 100,000 transaction more than master-card and Visa-card combined this means the Bitcoin price will simply explode to new all times high.
Ethereum theoretically has a higher throughput and far way salable and robust with the likes of Microsoft and Ubuntu showing interest.
BITCOIN MARKET CAP
Bitcoin market cap continues to rise as overall Bitcoin dominance in the cryptocurrency space saw a huge fall from around 84% to hovered around 65% currently even lower than 45%. This can be due to the rise of ethereum as it currently has half of Bitcoins market cap and ethereum enterprise just confirm over 80 companies are interested in ethereum, this is putting a huge buy pressure on its price. it has since gone up 35 times from $5 the beginning of this year to over $200
General global interest
More people are googling Bitcoin. According to google trends, more people are finding out about Bitcoin more than back in 2013 this is setting the stage for higher bitcoin prices in the future as interest reflects intention and demand will raise prices even higher we will see even higher prices in the future
chat of google trends available at google.
Interest in the Bitcoin space continues to rise as shown in the graph above Global Bitcoin weekly volume stands at an averave of $4Billion a day with china leading the way with over $8200000 a week
In recent weeks Volume in japan has seen a huge spike as Bitcoin is increasingly looking like money to the japanese government.
Interest across different industries
Interest in Bitcoin and blockchain based products continue to rise different industries are adopting Blockchain at a rapid rate. with over 300 companies being built on ethereum spanning an array of industries from Casino , Education, Banking, Healthcare, Gaming ETC Ethereum market cap will soon overtake Bitcoin becoming the most valuable Blockchain project on the planet. the price of ethereum can rise to a probable $1000 putting ethereums marketcap at over $1 Trillion when all-these companies are conducting active business on the blockchain this is a 8 year outlook.
Bitsoko Audience
A large chunk of our audience is male, Below are stats from our social media accounts . With a large percentage being under the age of 34, our exact target group. the young are pioneering block-chain adoption across the continent
Merchant Comments
We are currently working with several Merchants All who are based in Nairobi. We continue to get a lot of interest from Both individuals and businesses.