A recent report reveals that Bitcoin is inching closer by the day towards overtaking MasterCard in terms of daily transfers. This means that the premier cryptocurrency could soon overtake one of the leading traditional money transfer systems in the world.

Specifically, this news was covered in a fresh piece from the news outlet Trustnodes. Judging by the official numbers released by MasterCard in the payment behemoth’s latest quarterly report, it seems Bitcoin is becoming a more serious rival than ever.

Bitcoin already moves 73% of MasterCard’s daily volume

MasterCard has a daily volume of about $11 billion, according to the company’s public records. Bitcoin, on the other hand, transfers around $8 billion per day, meaning that it already moves 73% of MasterCard’s volume.

Bitcoin’s significant daily transfer volume is especially notable given the ongoing turmoil in the cryptocurrency markets. It would, therefore, seem that the cryptocurrency is already moving amount comparable to those handled by MasterCard.

Moreover, MasterCard reports that it has processed transactions worth a whopping $4.4 trillion since the start of the year. Although such statistics are not readily accessible for Bitcoin, it is possible to gauge through extrapolating its daily transfers.

Supposing a daily transfer volume of $8 billion, Bitcoin would have an annual volume of $3 trillion. It should be noted that this is indeed a large number for any transfer system – especially a cryptocurrency.

However, Bitcoin dwarfs other cryptocurrencies in this regard. Ethereum is the cryptocurrency which transfers the second-highest daily amount, but processes significantly less than Bitcoin. Ethereum has processed around $600 million in the last 24 hours, which would equal a yearly volume of around $0.25 trillion.

Moreover, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash also transfer notable volumes each day – albeit a far cry from Bitcoin’s. Litecoin transfers around $170 million per day, whilst Bitcoin Cash transfer approximately $120 million.

Cryptocurrencies move high values despite significantly lower transactions per second capacity

It could, therefore, be speculated that all cryptocurrencies put together rival MasterCard’s daily transfers. This is despite having a far lower capacity in transactions per second.

Nevertheless, this might be explained by the fact that cryptocurrencies are worth more than one dollar. Moreover, although a cryptocurrency transaction could be worth billions, MasterCard’s volume mostly stems from small purchases.

MasterCard is, however, dwarfed in turn by Visa, which handles daily volumes of around $30 billion. This equals roughly $11 trillion a year, and has a capacity of 65,000 transactions a second.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, supports 7 tx/s on-chain — which would equal around 0.01% of Visa’s transaction capacity. Nevertheless, Bitcoin transfers around 25% of the value processed by Visa.

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