By today’s standards, 
BTC is slow, has low throughput, and transactions are too costly. Therefore, BTC only ranks 14th out of 25 cryptocurrencies when analyzed for their usage as payment.
In addition, the acceptance of non-volatile stablecoins has increased significantly. Whereas no stablecoins were in the top 20 examined cryptocurrencies of Z. Li et al. (2019), 5 out of the top 20 by market capitalization are stablecoins today. Additionally, the shift from PoW to PoS is in full swing, benefiting cryptocurrencies' ability to fulfill the requirements of a means of payment in terms of costs, speed, and throughput.
Giudici et al. (2020) mention that a critical development is the emergence of new exchanges where people can access cryptocurrencies. This trend is also observable by the sheer number of exchanges, with 
Cryptocurrency companies also recently began with colossal marketing efforts to boost awareness.
Crypto.com exchange secured the naming rights for the Los Angeles Arena as part of a $700 million deal in November 2021.As awareness and accessibility increase, the network effect takes place as more people invest, and in turn, more platforms are willing to sell and accept cryptocurrencies. Even neo-brokers such as Trade Republic or Robinhood, which initially specialized in stocks, now have cryptocurrencies for sale.
The number of Accepting Venues is also rising. Coinmap lists 29202 shops worldwide as of March 02, 2022, which is more than double the 12813 listed venues on January 31, 2018.
There is also an increase in the number of cryptocurrencies and users. The number of cryptocurrencies doubled within the last year (GP Bullhound et al., 2022), while the number of users has increased two-fold within the first half of 2021, according to Statista (2021).
BTC as a legal tender.In turn, knowledge of cryptocurrencies also grows. Knowledge is not only a relevant factor discovered in the academic literature but is also observable in industry practice (Steinmetz et al., 2021). Educating the people is a central marketing part of different ecosystem entities (Steinmetz et al., 2021), which is also evident in the diverse learning opportunities offered by exchanges such as 
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With more attention, new challenges become evident. One of the biggest challenges cryptocurrencies are trying to solve today is scalability. As cryptocurrencies get more attention and users, transactions increase substantially, and some networks reach their capacity limit. This problem results in high transaction costs and low transaction speed, which is happening for the most popular cryptocurrencies, BTC and /w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=logo}
Attachment strategies such as the proposed Lightning Network for BTC attempt to make the system scalable by processing transactions off-chain (Lange et al., 2021). In contrast, /w=1920,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=logo}
Additionally, with this change, ethereum.org (2022a) is also solving the problem of rising energy consumption and extensive mining equipment associated with the PoW mechanism.
SOL have already solved the scalability issue and can process at least 50,000 transactions per second if necessary.
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