Most recent researchers place the number of crypto users, on-chain and on CEXs, at 420 million, which is roughly 5% of the world’s population. Why hasn’t there been a wider user adoption yet over 10 years after cryptocurrency started? (see link to research in my comment).

Triple-A and Statista estimate that there were over 420 million cryptocurrency users globally in 2023.

It is approximately 5.25% of the world's population.

Source: https://triple-a.io/cryptocurrency-ownership-data/

Why is it taking so long for mass adoption?

13 thoughts on “Most recent researchers place the number of crypto users, on-chain and on CEXs, at 420 million, which is roughly 5% of the world’s population. Why hasn’t there been a wider user adoption yet over 10 years after cryptocurrency started? (see link to research in my comment).”

  2. They keep buying, getting rekt and then quitting – then they see green candles and rinse and repeat

  4. I feel like that’s quite high already. People over 65 only make up 10% of the world’s population and they’re everywhere.

    Would love to see the demographic of crypto users, I imagine it drops off sharply as you progress through the generations. My boomer family mainly thinks it’s a scam and knows precisely nothing about any of it.

  5. > Why is it taking so long for mass adoption?

    Majority of people don’t trust it and believe every negative thing they read. It’s generally fiddly to use. Most of the people buying don’t even use it. Most projects don’t actually do anything. Of the ones that are useful it might be 1 out of 1000 coins and the shills for the other 999 coins are vexed that anything other than their own project’s price would go up so you have a lot of noise shitting on useful projects – this is very important in the equation: instead of the larger group wanting crypto as a whole to succeed, the “participants” want their specific bags to succeed and every other project can get fucked.

    Think about the game changing Web 2.0 projects that gained massive traction (for better or worse – the debate isn’t about how evil they are, it’s about how they gained traction). Google. Gmail. Wikipedia. Facebook. Twitter. Spotify. Netflix. What did they all do? They removed friction. Cryptocurrencies 99.999% of the time introduce friction via UI/UX directly at the point of onboarding.

  7. This is because people are not focused on building consumer level apps. Catgirl is building the first consumer level anime dress up game that will compete with Love Nikki. It’s also a meme coin if you only care about cash money like me.

    • 95% of users is here to speculate.
    • 5% because of technology and politics.
    • 0.001% because they can do something that they couldn’t do otherwise.

    Internet isn’t a good comparison.

  9. There is no one single simple answer to your question. It’s many things.

    1: It’s hard to get started. Don’t think about what you know, now. Think about when you were first getting started.

    2: It’s harder to spend than cash.

    3: It’s hard to secure. This is why most crypto owners keep their coins on exchanges, which isn’t safe. And I’d bet that most of those who DO set up their own wallets don’t really know what they’re doing. And I can’t blame them. Documentation for newcomers is abysmal. So much of this stuff you have to figure out the hard way.

    4: Just like the internet in the early 90s, the supporting tech isn’t very good yet. Apps are clunky as hell (Electrum!) and buggy (Blockstream Green!). There’s often no documentation at all, as if average Joe is going to look it up on Github (OneKey!). Hardware wallets are mostly cheap toys (Jade, Trezor, Ledger) with shitty code (OneKey), some of which cannot be trusted (Ledger!!!). Others hide features because they think users are too stupid to use them correctly (also Ledger, and most others).

    5: SCAMS ARE EVERYWHERE.

    6: Volatility scares the hell out of the masses. Even people with experience who should know better are scared and selling when they should be buying. Seriously, if you’re a Bitcoiner and you’re not buying now, you’re out of your freaking mind.

    7: “Buy it… to do what?” I buy Bitcoin for a store of value. How do I convince somebody who has less than $100 in savings that they need a store of value? Sadly, they won’t understand that unless the bottom falls out of the economy – and I don’t mean where the price of bread goes from $1 to $2. I mean a hard crash, where bread sells for $1000 and eggs sell for $5000.

    8: There’s no killer app. iTunes made mp3s mainstream. Instagram made phone photography mainstream. Netflix made streaming movies mainstream.

    9: There’s no killer hardware. The iPod changed the music industry forever. Streaming devices like AppleTV and Amazon Fire changed the way people watch TV. Laptops and then iPads changed the way people use computers. As I already said, most hardware wallets are junk, and the owners don’t even realize how bad they are because they’ve never used anything better.

    Sadly, I could go on and on.

    I love Bitcoin. It has truly changed my life. I wish I could convince more people to buy it and hold it long term, but we’re still in the early days, where the tech is only ready for the techies, and the gamblers who dominate this space are screwing themselves over by chasing dollars instead of building up long term wealth.

    Sigh.

  10. What is there to adopt? What is the use case of crypto except for investment?

    Don’t tell me about possibilities and hipoteticals. That are products available today that don’t already exist elsewhere? 

  11. i would like to know how they collected the data, since I have an account on most of CEXes, and many other wallets…

    I highly doubt that 5% of world’s population uses crypto

  12. There are a lot of kids in the world’s populationnas well as millions of millions of millions that do not have internet

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