Crypto.com has released their annual market sizing report showing a significant month-on-month growth in crypto users, specifically a 21% jump in the first half of 2023, suggesting that nearly 1 in 10 people on earth are holding crypto, with almost half of that figure holding some Bitcoin.
The report opines that drivers of the increase included the introduction of the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol which brought NFTs to the Bitcoin network for the first time as well as ongoing Ethereum upgrades. Interest in BTC ETFs has been growing as well as institutions consider Bitcoin to be an asset which deserves a (very small) allocation.
The report uses a methodology of on-chain analysis of deposit addresses to estimate the number of global users since any one user can have as many wallet addresses as they please, and users on exchanges don't necessarily need to have a separate wallet address.
On a pure wallet analysis view, Glass Node reports that daily active Bitcoin addresses continue to rise, with around 20M addresses active.
Glassnode see around 6M daily active wallets for Ethereum:
The amount of data available on-chain for analysis only increases, with greater transparency around how crypto-assets move, and providing unprecedented opportunities for businesses like Chainalysis and Elliptic to also report on the growth of crypto-adoption as well as the prevalence (or lack thereof) of crime in crypto systems.
The sharing of this kind of information is useful for regulators and policymakers to consider when determining how this industry will impact our digital economy in the future.