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 $150M mcap in four days. [2]
4. USDT daily unique senders/receivers - under 80,000. This doesn't exclude bots, exchanges, smart contracts, and users with multiple wallets (I have 8 wallets). You also can't go more mainstream or "utility" than this coin. Real unique daily users are probably under 30k. [3]
Exchange users are immaterial. They're just traders and investors buying the next cycle of trash. Actual usage metrics are on-chain users.
This is being pitched as the next Visa but in reality, the network slows to a crawl even when it has to serve 10-20k real users. Meanwhile, Visa is able to serve literally hundreds of millions of users every month.
I am not interested in getting into the weeds, but honestly, the fact that you're pointing to actual memecoins like "$PEPE" and spurious DAU measurements, but still ceding a 10x of your original 1-2k users claim gives me very little confidence in you being a serious person.
This is such a quintessentially crypto huckster response, with all the usual blind spots in all the usual places. You've measured virtual dollars, while OP was measuring actual human users.
He didn't. Like he admitted, it's not possible to do so with any sort of accuracy using on chain data. There are over a billion Bitcoin addresses but this might overcount the number of users since wallets are typically composed of multiple addresses, or it could undercount due to the popularity of custodian service where multiple users share the same addresses.
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.
Your link isn't showing up yet , but I can answer anyway with my own survey. I can account for over a hundred different crypto wallets, including a number of duplicates on the same chain, some of which have been active at one point or another over the past decade. At one point about 6 years ago it was close to a thousand. And in the circles I used to frequent (miners and pool ops - often the same entities), this was a middling number, not extraordinary at all.
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.
I'm in a few telegram groups with a bunch of large whales, including a few influencers you would know by name if you're active on Twitter.
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.
> I can account for over a hundred different crypto wallets, including a number of duplicates on the same chain, some of which have been active at one point or another over the past decade.
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.
On-chain data establishes a useful upper bound on active user count, but does not say the actual number. The upper bound is low enough to say that it's a few thousand users.
The upper bound would be over 1 billion for Bitcoin (1+ billion unique addresses)[0]. The number of daily active addresses is around 1 million[1]. And that doesn't account for second layer transactions. Where do you get the "few thousand" from?
I literally shared on chain data. That's actual users. Even if you assume that all 80k unique wallets that exchanged USDT yesterday were real users, that's just...80,000 users. Niche forums have more users than that.
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.
People don't have to use something every day to be users.
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.
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).
> On chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users.
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.
I meant it was useless in the sense that we can't accurately determine the number of users from looking at on-chain data. As you've also explained in earlier comments, there is the issue of "multiple addresses - one user" and there is the issue of "single address - multiple users". If we ignore the latter issue, we can put an upper bound at ~1 billion users for Bitcoin due to the unique address count but that's just an upper bound, the actual number is lower but we can't know how much lower.
We're on the same page but we're looking at different metrics. I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.
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.
> I'm talking about daily usage which, even if you assume that every wallet is a unique user, is in the tens of thousands at most.
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.
No, this is the on-chain transaction data ("real usage"). The transactions you are referring to ("exchanging house money for more make believe money") is the exchange volume which does not appear on chain and is a lot higher ($18,000,000,000+ for Bitcoin yesterday).
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?
That graph is for the number of transaction, not transaction volume. Bitcoin has a max amount of transactions per block and blocks have been more or less saturated since a while so the number of transactions can't actually increase. It certainly doesn't look like it's decreasing. A lot of the transactions has been moving to second layer solutions as well, with on-chain becoming a sort of settlement layer.
This is clearly false and I welcome you to try and prove otherwise.