After more than 10 years since bitcoins were first transacted, the cryptocurrency market has been growing both globally, with Philippines actually considered one of the world’s fastest adopters of cryptocurrency.
The first quarter of 2021 witnessed bitcoin, the first and top cryptocurrency, hitting $1 trillion in market value, according to digital currency information platform Coindesk. Bitcoin reached its record high of $67,016.5 in October 2021. Ether, meanwhile, peaked its price to as high as $4,643 in November 2021. As of the same month, cryptocurrency data aggregator Coin Gecko estimates the cryptocurrency market’s worth at over $3 trillion.
This rise follows a five-fold increase in the value of transactions processed by virtual currency exchanges to P76 billion in end-September 2020 from P14.9 billion in end-September 2019. The volume of transaction, meanwhile, went up by nearly 36% to 7.2 million from 5.3 million in 2019. Meanwhile, in the Global Crypto Adoption Index by blockchain data analytics firm Chainalysis, the Philippines ranked 15out of 157 countries. On a scale of 0 to 1, with a number closer to 1 indicating a higher rank and higher adoption, the country scored 0.16.
Digital bank Paymaya Philippines, Inc., which recently relaunched its mobile app as Maya, has rolled out a cryptocurrency feature in its app which allows its users to buy and trade digital currencies, and so help make cryptocurrencies more accessible to the public.