This is clearly false and I welcome you to try and prove otherwise.
This is clearly false and I welcome you to try and prove otherwise.
1. NFT platforms usage volume. OS is down below 5,000 users [0]
2. Arbitrum airdrop to 625k wallets. Most users have multiple wallets. I got airdrops on 3 different wallets. Some friends sybilled this to over 100 wallets. Actual unique wallets not more than 100k. Even free money can't entice people to use this. [1]
3. $PEPE total holders: 35,000. Exclude bots and multiple wallets and that's not more than 15k actual users. Hottest memecoin that shit up to $150M mcap in four days. [2]
4. USDT daily unique senders/receivers - under 80,000. This doesn't exclude bots, exchanges, smart contracts, and users with multiple wallets (I have 8 wallets). You also can't go more mainstream or "utility" than this coin. Real unique daily users are probably under 30k. [3]
Exchange users are immaterial. They're just traders and investors buying the next cycle of trash. Actual usage metrics are on-chain users.
This is being pitched as the next Visa but in reality, the network slows to a crawl even when it has to serve 10-20k real users. Meanwhile, Visa is able to serve literally hundreds of millions of users every month.
0. https://dune.com/queries/1622348/2688962?utm_source=mintorsk...
1. https://dune.com/blockworks_research/arb-airdrop
2. https://etherscan.io/token/0x6982508145454Ce325dDbE47a25d4ec...
3. https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...
Ethereum: around 3,000,000,000 USD transacted yesterday on-chain (not counting off-chain)[1].
[0] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/estimated-transac...
[1] https://www.theblock.co/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/ether...
The best we can do are surveys. According to this one[0], there are around 34 million Americans that have a cryptocurrency wallet. I suppose the world wide number of users is a lot higher.
[0] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/us-adults-crypt...
Anyone who has ever created an account on a crypto exchange has a crypto address. I have accounts at Binance, WazirX, Kraken, Crypto.com, Gate.io, Mexc, ByBit, and probably 2-3 more exchanges I can't remember. That means I have 10+ addresses.
But that's not real users. Any money I've sent to exchanges is just for trading/investing. I'm not actually using the tech.
On-chain usage is the only real usage. The rest is just banking with more hurdles and scams.
I think we're in agreement here? On-chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users. That's why I was sharing survey data, which is the best approximation we can get.
For actual users using the tech, it's also difficult to know but we can see that the on-chain transaction volume is quite significant (multi billion dollar daily).
I assume anyone who owns crypto but hasn't made any on-chain trasaction to not be a real user but just a speculator. Ergo, immaterial if you're talking about the viability of the network to scale.
The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
That's incorrect. The number of daily active addresses for Bitcoin is around 1 million[0].
> The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
To me, that's super impressive given that many people on HN initially dismissed. I personally never thought it would grow beyond the initial group of cryptography/p2p nerds. I was super shocked when Bitcoin was mentioned on TV for the first time. Has any non-governmental money ever made it that far? I don't think so. It's come a long way, but I understand the numbers are a bit disappointing to those who were expecting Bitcoin to completely displace fiat. And in the end, it's a matter of perspective and there's no right or wrong answer.
[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...
I mostly just buy crypto once a month and every once in awhile make a purchase with it when it makes sense (usually either towards a new computer or some place I don't want getting my credit card info).
If crypto became the default (which I'd be fine with), I'd use it all the time. But there's enough fees converting from USD to crypto and then making a purchase on top of that, as well as hassle with taxes each year (since I do report crypto transactions on my taxes) that trying to use it for all transactions, currently, isn't worth it for me.
So on most days I wouldn't even show up in that 80,000 DAU (well, especially since I don't touch USDT at all, keep in mind there's quite a few coins out there, not everyone interacts with all, or even more than a few of them).
And yet I keep up with crypto news, read crypto forums, watch videos about crypto, on an almost daily basis. Personally, I'd consider myself a user of crypto, and find it to be a useful tool. But just like my drill or my hammer, I don't use it every single day, just when the situation calls for it.
The simple observation that one runs* into the same several dozen people over, and over, and over again at every crypto congregation whether online or in person, should be a strong indication that this is an extremely inbred space and the sock puppetry amplification from principal to agent is conservatively inflating usage metrics by a factor of 100 if not more.
* edit: okay this is somewhat dated information, maybe today it's a couple hundred instead of several dozen.
Indeed, on-chain address data is more or less useless for counting users, I mentioned this in my comments. The survey I shared wasn't based on on-chain data.
[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...
[1] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.Activ...
One of these whales has a bot farm sybiling every protocol imaginable 24x7. Got an Arbitrum airdrop of over 1,000,000 tokens across more than 800 wallets.
I have about 10 addresses in my main Metamask account, and I have iirc 4-5 Metamask accounts, each with minimum 2-3 addresses.
Crypto has been positioned as the decentralized alternative to Visa and SWIFT. Their real human users number in the tens of millions daily.
The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?
Also, Bitcoin transaction volume peaked in 2018 and has been trending down for a while :)
I'm not sure why you say transaction volume peaked in 2018, it didn't. You can zoom out from the graph I linked to and chose the "All" timeframe. There's a lot of variance but 2018 wasn't the peak.
> The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?
Second layer systems like the Liquid network.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...
I also shared unique transacting addresses for USDT yesterday. That's surely not a memecoin, and that was under 80,000 addresses yesterday.
I trade crypto and its very profitable, but don't waste your time buying the hopium of this scam.