In less than a year, Dwolla has grown its processing volume to $1 million per day. For a closer look, see the above graph at dwolla.org. Graphic courtesy of Dwolla
Five weeks ago, Dwolla announced a momentous milestone: $1 million a week in transactions. Today, the peer-to-peer payments network is at it again, announcing in a blog post that they’ve hit $1 million a day. Visually plotting this growth for the fist time, they’ve posted the above infographic, showing the use of their network since its December launch, most notable, the hockey stick-like growth this past month.
“What it means for us is it’s a good market validation point,” Dwolla co-founder and CEO Ben Milne said in a Skype interview yesterday. “There’s a lot of payment services that don’t get that far, there’s a lot that get further, and we intend to get a lot further.”
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As he did with the recent announcement, Milne made a comparison to Square, another mobile payments startup. “We got excited when Square did a million a day and we’re pretty stoked that we got there, too.”
Square, which received a $1 billion valuation in June, is now processing credit card transactions of $4 million per day. The San Francisco-based startup co-founded by Jack Dorsey hit its $1 million per day milestone 16 months after its October 2010 launch.
Dwolla, a cash-based network, will be hitting its milestone seven months after its national launch, 19 months after its initial Iowa-only roll-out. Different from credit card swipes on Square, however, Dwolla calculates its transaction number by totaling all dollars processed through the system, which takes place one of three ways: deposit, withdrawal or an inter-Dwolla transaction.
Though Milne wouldn’t give details around average transaction level or a breakdown of the three types of processes, he said that “more than half transactions are inter-Dwolla,” which is its revenue-generator – a flat fee of $0.25 is charged to the sender or receiver.
“There would be somedays where I would say inter-Dwolla is probably in excess of a million,” Milne said, “but I would say most days it’s probably a pretty easy to predict ratio between deposit, withdraw and inter-Dwolla.”
As he did with their per-week milestone, Milne credits Dwolla’s growth to its mobile products, the potential of FiSync, which signed up its first client last week, and the launch of Grid in June, their biggest sign up day to date. He also recognized that Bitcoin, a virtual currency, is a part of that equation. “I think virtual currency is definitely one of those things that is still evolving over time and we’re definitely looking forward to kind of being a part of that and learning as well along the way,” Milne said.
In the coming months, Dwolla will be signing up more FiSync clients – around 15 that in total represent an excess of a million clients around the country – and working with developers on the release of third-party products that implement Grid.
So, will Dwolla’s growth continue at this rate? “It’s possible, right?” Milne said.
“What we’re looking at is how do we continue to work on the vision we already had and build out the products we think people are going to utilize for the future and what’s the future of payments look like as far as we see it.”
Milne added: “This (milestone) is not something we have six hours to celebrate over, this is something that we’re releasing but at the end of the day we’re heads down getting ready for the meetup next month, and that’s really where our heads at, just kind of continuing to build out that core network that we see as being you know really the first and probably really the only cash-based payment network. We just have a lot of work to do.”
For a hint at what they’ll be revealing at their August 24 meetup and to hear Milne share what this milestone means to him and his team, check out the following video.
