The estimate is that we currently have 300 million people using bitcoin. In January 2021, there were 135 million, a figure similar to the number of internet users in 1997. According to analyst Willy Woo (who has even developed a chart showing the windows of opportunity to buy BTC), BTC’s adoption curve is faster than that of the internet.
“The adoption curve of bitcoin is faster than any previous innovation. Its use is growing faster than the internet, smartphones, and even virtual banking”, he said on his Twitter feed.
While his calculations may contain some margin of error since anonymous wallets prevent accurate identification of unique users, Woo says the estimates are based on blockchain analysis by specialized tools.
Corroborating with its data, the Twitter profile Documenting Bitcoin also compared the number of BTC users with the number of people using the internet, showing the significant growth of crypto assets compared to other innovations.
Adoption curve could be even faster, the report shows
It is worth explaining that the adoption curve of technology is a sociological model that describes how a new product is accepted according to certain groups’ demographic and psychological features.
The first stage of this curve is usually composed of “innovators”, who anticipate trends. This represents 2.5% of the world’s population, or about 155 million people – a number very close to the one identified by Woo in 2021.
Although the data is from last year, the prospect of adoption growth remains high, either because of new regulations that are emerging and promoting greater security for users or because some countries have also started to use crypto assets, as in the case of El Salvador. In addition, a more recent report from exchange Crypto.com shows that the number of people with crypto assets in their e-wallets could reach 1 billion by the end of 2022.
For Safiri Felix, Director of Products and Partnerships at Transfero, crypto assets are a hard force to be stopped. In addition to bitcoin and its increasingly consolidated fan base, interest in DeFi and web3 has also been gaining momentum, proving blockchain technology’s potential to achieve mass usage over time.
