In dThe past bull market showed that the crypto market grew much faster than the internet in its early years. Macro guru Raoul Pal even found out recently that crypto will have around 5 billion users worldwide by 2030. New information shows that this may be true, but also that it is complicated.
Crypto popularity overdone?
Pal’s analysis implied that the world of cryptocurrencies is growing much faster than the internet. In total, the crypto industry two years ago have about 295 million users had. For comparison; when the internet was the same age it only had 119 million. The crypto market is therefore growing at an average annual rate of 137%. The growth of the Internet is estimated at 43% to 76% per year.
CryptoSlate reconsidered this view. The crypto website notes that there are snags to the model. It is not easy to measure how many users there are in crypto. Before the internet, counting the number of internet connections was probably enough, but that doesn’t work in cryptoland.
For example, as an individual you can have multiple crypto wallets. For example, it seems as if several people are active in the industry, while in reality you are just trying to spread your risk by not keeping all your coins in one wallet. Also, people may forget how to remove cryptocurrencies from their wallets, making the wallets completely useless. And crypto exchanges often use only a few wallets for a large number of users. That makes the picture even more complicated.
The crypto newspaper gets a Wells Fargo report describing that the industry is far from reaching the point of mass adoption. Instead, the market would be more like the Internet in the late 1990s. Like the internet, the crypto market may first find a plateau.
Model may be correct after all
Still, CryptoSlate wears rose-colored glasses. For example, Coinbase grows at an average annual rate of 92%. That is still considerably faster than the internet. But the internet saw a significant dip in interest from the DotCom bubble. After this, the industry only grew at a rate of 17% per year.
Even if that happens, it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe for crypto. At 17% per year, it could have about 900 million users by 2025, according to CryptoSlate. So almost 1 billion. At the moment, about 605 million people are said to be in crypto. So even with a growth of 17%, 1 billion people might still be feasible.