Bitcoin in Italy

2018: Italian online stores pay 6 times more for Bitcoin than with Visa and Mastercard credit cards

At the end of October 2019, the SEMrush service, specializing in the study of online activity, published a study that showed the high popularity of Bitcoin in Italy. It turned out that local residents more often pay with this cryptocurrency for purchases in online stores than using credit cards.

According to the Italian publication La Stampa, in 2018 the volume of the local e-commerce market amounted to $40 billion, and Bitcoin was used to pay for purchases on it on average 215,800 times a month. For comparison, Visa and Mastercard credit cards were used 33,950 times.

It turned out that local residents more often pay with this cryptocurrency for purchases in online stores than using credit cards.

The most popular means of paying for purchases online among Italians remains the PayPal system, with the help of which in 2018 almost 1.4 million payment transactions were processed every month. A little behind it was the Italian service PostePay, which was used 1.2 million times monthly to purchase goods and services on the Internet. In fourth place is the American Express rating with an indicator of 189 thousand purchases.

Italians are very interested in Bitcoin and the development of the crypto industry as a whole. The country has not yet announced how it will regulate this direction, so many online stores in the country still do not accept payment in cryptocurrencies.

According to Kaspersky Lab, by 2019, every eighth person in the world used bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to make purchases on the Internet.

According to the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of the cryptographic platform operator Bakkt Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Jeffrey Sprecher, in the future Bitcoin may become a savings asset. However, to achieve this status, according to the expert, the coin should be more widely distributed in the world, as a tool for making payments on a regular basis.^[1]

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