Where are we on the crypto adoption curve?

I recently came across this graphic (within this tweet thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1812777936183083273.html?utm_source=tldrcrypto ) which is both a tale of amazing success for the industry and also shows how far we have to go.

Whilst it’s amazing to see the worldwide number of crypto holders grow to almost 7%, seeing that almost 40% of recent crypto owners are at a loss and that those who don’t own crypto have a strong anti-crypto leaning shows that we need to do more to educate crypto and non-crypto fans alike on everything from scam protection to basic investor awareness.

Let’s dig into some of these stats and facts from the thread:

• There was a 33% growth in crypto ownership from 2023 and perhaps unsurprisingly the most common age group to own crypto is 24-35 year olds. Whilst surveys and reports generally find this is a male skewed ownership, a recent report from the Nakamoto Project (of c3.5k US citizens) found it was at a 46% to 52% split (with an ‘other’ category also represented), and interestingly saw a even split across political orientations (however we might see that start to change in the US with recent events ??)

• The top countries by ownership are the UAE, Singapore, Turkey, Argentina, Thailand and Brazil. This is a mix of economies where high inflation is likely driving citizens to crypto as a store of value, as well as economies who are focussed on innovation and growing their tech use. When I travelled to El Salvador I got the chance to use bitcoin to pay for my dinner and speak to locals about the benefits it was bringing them (tourism, digital money, financial control etc - as well as those who felt it was political corruption or wanted to only use dollars) and all too often crypto’s use in countries across the world is primarily speculation and not ‘real world’ problem solving (I know that’s a controversial statement!) so it was nice to read this recent tweet thread showing how crypto can be used in Ghana to avoid inflation, distrust in banks and high fees!

• The Ordinals/Runes/Inscriptions minting activity on Bitcoin is largely dying down and Bitcoin activity levels have dropped to around 2018 activity. Solana memecoin hype is still coming in waves and is driving lots of new crypto entrants (and their associated losses). Ethereum L2s are still seeing very high levels of activity with much still airdrop farming. However bitcoin and Ether ETF approvals have definitely been a boost for activity and interest - especially from institutions. I recently came across a new onchain metric called Chain GDP which aims to capture the true activity of a chain without wash trading impact, it will be interesting to see how this catches on and differs from the more widely used metrics if TPS and TVL: https://dynamodefi.substack.com/p/introducing-chain-gdp-dynamo-defi?utm_source=tldrcrypto ?

• To be in the black crypto profit wise you had to be in by 2017 or earlier. This isn’t surprising based on the growth in cryptoasset prices since then but this image shows the different profitability levels from other eras.?

There's definitely some steps forward when it comes to crypto adoption, but as we can see above, still many steps to go.