a16z estimates that there are currently between 30 million to 60 million real crypto users each month.
Written by: Maren Matsuoka, Eddy Lazzarin, a16z Crypto
Translated by: 0xxz, Golden Finance
As part of a16z's 2024 report on the state of the crypto industry, our team spent considerable time trying to assess the crypto sector. With the industry's maturation and the launch of more applications, we wanted to understand how many users are genuinely using cryptocurrencies.
This is a nuanced question because the most obvious and easily quantifiable usage metric—active addresses—can be easily manipulated. Therefore, below we share our thoughts.
In traditional software, the concept of a "user" is well understood. Of course, there are many ways to measure user quality—in fact, an entire field of growth analytics is dedicated to this—but at its most basic, users can be summarized as "daily active users" (DAU), "monthly active users" (MAU), and so on.
In the crypto space, things get trickier. This is because on the blockchain, user identities are anonymous. A person can easily create and control what is known as a sybil—a set of different identities referred to as "public addresses." (There are many perfectly legitimate reasons for doing this, such as for privacy, security, or other purposes.) Therefore, it is difficult to know how many addresses a single person can use. (Conversely, multiple people can use a single address through multi-signature, aggregated accounts, and various account abstraction protocols.)
Until recently, the capacity of the most popular blockchains was very limited, leading to high transaction fees. This created a natural barrier to launching and using hundreds or thousands of addresses, as doing so would incur significant costs. However, recently, crypto infrastructure has become more scalable—through L2 rollups and new high-throughput L1s—bringing many blockchain transaction costs down to nearly zero.
But isn't the cost of creating multiple identities close to zero for traditional internet applications as well? In most cases, this is true. For example, it is very easy for a person to create and use multiple email addresses. But the key difference is that in cryptocurrency, there are strong incentives for this behavior.
The crypto industry has long rewarded early users of protocols with tokens. Nowadays, new protocols often launch their circulating token supply through "airdrops"—a reward activity that provides token incentives to a predefined set of addresses. These address lists are typically derived from historical transaction records on the chain. Some may attempt to game the system by creating many different identities and using them for transactions. In the industry, this strategy is commonly referred to as "farming airdrops."
Given these behaviors, it is clear that the 220 million unique monthly active addresses we measured in September 2024 do not directly translate to 220 million individuals or users. (Note that addresses active on multiple EVM chains only contribute once to the total of 220 million.)
So how many active users are there? 10 million? 50 million? 100 million? This is the question we aim to answer. Here is more information about our methodology.
Method 1: Filtering Active Addresses
One approach we took was to filter out addresses suspected of being controlled by bots or sybils. Using on-chain analysis and forensics, we explored various methods to achieve this:
Filter out addresses that receive funds from dispersion contracts—dispersion contracts are smart contracts whose sole purpose is to receive funds and automatically distribute them to many different addresses. While there may be some false positives, this activity means that the target addresses all receive funds from a single source, thus being somehow interconnected.
Filter out addresses that have balances close to zero at both the beginning and end of a given time period. For example, if you are looking for real monthly active users in September 2024—you might try to exclude addresses that had balances close to zero on September 1 and September 30. This criterion implies that these addresses are essentially temporary. While bots and sybils may seek to "clean up" balances after taking action, real human users typically want to keep some balance in their wallets to pay for future transaction fees.
Analyze the distribution of addresses with one, two, three, four, five, or more transactions during the period. Addresses with only one or two transactions during the period are likely low-quality users, at worst bots or sybils. This method works best when aggregated over a longer period.
Filter out addresses that have conducted a large number of transactions in a very short time. Users of wallets or application interfaces can only reasonably handle a certain number of transactions within a given time period, while bots can trade at a higher frequency.
Optimistically include addresses bound to identity protocols that require some setup costs. For example, addresses with ENS names, Farcaster IDs, and other linked social identities are likely to be real human users.
These are just some patterns on-chain that may indicate bot-like behavior. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we welcome suggestions based on the above.
Method 2: Inferring Based on Wallet Users
Another way to estimate monthly active users is to look at off-chain data sources. The most obvious starting point is wallet users.
In February 2024, the popular crypto wallet MetaMask reported that it had 30 million monthly active users. They defined monthly active users as "people who loaded a page in the MetaMask extension or opened the mobile app at least once during any consecutive 30-day period."
Assuming we want to estimate the number of trading users, the next step is to determine the percentage of MetaMask users who actually conducted transactions. In 2019, MetaMask reported that on a given day, about 30% of active users confirmed on-chain transactions. (This is the latest available estimate.) If we apply this ratio to the MAU, we find that approximately 9 million users conduct transactions monthly through the MetaMask wallet product.
Next, we need to understand MetaMask's total wallet market share across all blockchains. While these exact figures are not easy to obtain, we can make some educated guesses based on known information. For example, we made a good estimate of MetaMask's market share in mobile wallets based on data from mobile analytics company Sensor Tower. (Due to commercial service agreements, we cannot disclose specific numbers here.)
Once we have an estimated market share for MetaMask, we can simply infer an estimate of the total number of cryptocurrency users based on the 9 million monthly active trading users figure we derived earlier. We can then compare this with the results from Method 1 to see if it falls within the same range.
We can further refine our estimates by analyzing data from other wallet and infrastructure providers willing to share their proprietary metrics, then cross-referencing with the numbers derived above.
Other Considerations
It is important to consider that some people use multiple addresses and wallets for trading. This is unlikely to significantly increase the numbers (because, unlike bots and sybils, there is a reasonable upper limit to the number of wallets a person can use), but further deduplication may be worthwhile based on some reasonable assumptions.
On the other hand, there are cases where a single address can be associated with multiple human users. Exchange aggregated accounts are one example. By the way, with the surge of account abstraction protocols and smart contract wallets, all of this will become more complex. We did not account for these factors in our analysis.
Final Estimate: 30-60 Million Actual Monthly Trading Users
Based on our analysis using the various methods outlined above, we estimate that there are currently between 30 million to 60 million real crypto users each month. Clearly, this is a large range, but it is the best estimate we can derive from the existing data.
Note that this only accounts for 14-27% of the 220 million monthly active addresses we measured in September. It also only represents 5-10% of the 617 million global cryptocurrency holders reported by Crypto.com in June. (Global cryptocurrency holders refer to those who own cryptocurrencies but may not necessarily transact on-chain.) This discrepancy indicates a significant opportunity to convert existing cryptocurrency holders (most of whom are passive holders) into active users. With substantial improvements in infrastructure enabling new, compelling applications and consumer experiences, dormant cryptocurrency holders may re-emerge as on-chain users.
Measuring the number of active crypto users is challenging, but by employing some of the methods detailed in this article, reasonable estimates can begin to be derived.
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