Internet vs Crypto Adoption Chart Predicts – Crypto influencer Lark Davies tweeted a graph showing the adoption rates of the Internet and cryptocurrencies. Overlaying the respective lines, considering when both started to gain traction, demonstrates a close correlation between the two.
If this trend continues, it is predicted that there will be one billion crypto users by 2026/27. That is a 5x increase from current estimates of around 200 million crypto users.
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Crypto adoption mirrors that of the Internet
Earlier in 2020, on-chain analyst Willy Woo commented that crypto adoption is comparable to the Internet. Things start slow, but over time, crypto adoption will explode.
Woo said that the mass adoption of crypto is not yet here, nor are the masses seeing it happening because human perception tends to process information linearly.
“Human nature looks at things in a linear posture. So we’re not very good at looking at exponential growth, which is obviously what bitcoin is doing .”
Current estimations of the number of crypto users vary. Davis puts this figure at 200 million, or about 2.5% of the world’s population. Still, according to a study by blockchain solutions company Triple-A, users are less than 300 million, or 4% of the world’s population.
On the question of why mass crypto adoption isn’t here yet, Woo said that asking that is the equivalent of an Internet user in 1994 asking why no one uses the Internet. In other words, adoption is happening right now.
How would Web3.0 fit into this?
Touted as the subsequent progress of the Internet, Web3.0 has a lot to live up to. But, as a somewhat nebulous term, what exactly is it, and why is it essential regarding cryptocurrency?
In a Medium post by VC firm Fabric Ventures, Web3.0 is described as the ability for users and machines to interact over peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties.
“The result: a privacy-preserving, human-centric composable computing framework for the next wave of the web.”
The term peer-to-peer is a big clue about how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology fit into the picture.
If Web3 takes off, the logical result will fully integrate the Internet and blockchain.
Thus driving crypto adoption exponentially to levels that exceed even Woo’s expectations.
Bitcoin adoption is still in its early stages
As you can understand from the chart, there are 4 stages in the adoption curve: Innovators, Early Adopters, First Majority, Late Majority, and Late Majority. According to Levin, BTC currently has a penetration rate of around 6.1%.
However, the number of people “actively” investing could be much lower. Levin estimates that around 2.2 billion people around the world have assets above $ 10,000, which is enough to invest in BTC. He calculates a “conservative investor base denominator” of around 1.14 billion people based on these data. Therefore, Bitcoin acceptance is currently at the “first peek of the majority”.
In theory, a financial network can reach anyone with an Internet connection. Therefore, Levin uses a higher denominator (4.66 billion for internet access) to calculate penetration and acceptance. With this denominator and the current figure of 135 million, BTC penetration is 2.8%. He adds:
“Bitcoin as an asset has the potential to turn into an early majority, while Bitcoin as a network is at the height of its transition from innovator to the early adopter. Overall, the intersection of the two places Bitcoin at the beginning of the adoption curve, possibly somewhere in the early adoption stage.”