Chainalysis: Bitcoin Cash payments down to $3.7M in May from $10.5M in March, Bitcoin payments totaled $60M in May, down from $412M in September
- Commercial use of Bitcoin Cash dropped to $3.7 million May — Chainalysis says there are few larger users of the coin
Context & Ripple Effects
This Chainalysis report is the second half of a story that began earlier in August, when its data showed Bitcoin received by the 17 largest crypto processing services had collapsed from $412M in September 2017 to $69M by June 2018. The new numbers extend that decline to the coin level: Bitcoin Cash commercial use fell to $3.7M in May from $10.5M in March, and Bitcoin itself was down to $60M in May.
The significance is that the merchant-payments narrative — the original pitch for both coins — is shrinking rather than maturing, and Chainalysis notes few larger users remain on Bitcoin Cash. A later study confirmed the pattern held, with daily transactions and transaction values falling through September 2018.
First-order effects
- Crypto payment processors lose their core volume: with Bitcoin at $60M and Bitcoin Cash at $3.7M in May, the fee revenue pool for the largest processing services has shrunk by roughly an order of magnitude since September 2017.
Second-order effects
- Processors and merchants diversify away from BTC-only acceptance — a shift BitPay later quantified when it reported Bitcoin falling to about 65% of its merchants' crypto payments as Ether and stablecoins took share.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto's commercial-use case consolidates around whichever assets merchants actually settle in, leaving smaller-payment coins like Bitcoin Cash without a distinct merchant niche and pushing the industry's value story toward speculation and other uses.
The trend: Cryptocurrency is retreating from its merchant-payments origin story, with on-chain commerce volumes collapsing across major coins and processors pivoting to multi-asset settlement.