Defining and Benchmarking Crypto Adoption

The rise of the crypto ecosystem has often been compared with the early years of the internet. In addition, the peak of the crypto asset bubble in December 2017 has been compared with a (smaller scale) dotcom bubble. Beyond parallels in price inflation, many also hope the ecosystem is a similar inflection point in terms of innovation and adoption. As the chart above shows, the dotcom collapse was merely the beginning of the internet revolution which led to unimaginable innovation and near-universal internet adoption. Is this where we are on the crypto adoption curve?

Defining Adoption

Before attempting to answer that question, we first need to ask ourselves what crypto adoption really means. One option is to equate this with growth in blockchain wallets and active Bitcoin and/or Ethereum addresses. The challenge with this is twofold: (1) The same user can have multiple wallets or addresses, and more importantly, (2) wallet and even transaction volume growth largely measures growth in speculation, not meaningful usage.

Crypto”currency” is really a misnomer because payments have become an insignificant use case even for major payment-themed…