Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Says There Is Likely 30–60 Million ‘Real’ Monthly Crypto Users

Researchers at the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) estimate there are tens of millions of “real” monthly crypto users.

Calculating crypto users can be difficult because people are often incentivized to create multiple public addresses for security or things like airdrop farming, according to a new analysis conducted by Eddy Lazzarin, the chief technology officer (CTO) for a16z Crypto, and Daren Matsuoka, a data scientist at the firm.

So even though Andreessen Horowitz measured 220 million unique monthly active addresses in the month of September, that doesn’t mean there are 220 million users, the researchers explain.

Using on-chain analytics and forensics, Lazzarin and Matsuoka filtered out addresses that receive funds from dispersion contracts, which are designed to take in funds and automatically distribute them across many different addresses. They also filtered out addresses that had near-zero balances at the beginning and the end of September, as well as addresses with many transactions over a very short period of time.

“Humans using a wallet or application interface can only reasonably process a certain number of transactions in a given period of time, whereas bots can transact at greater frequencies.” 

The duo also analyzed off-chain data sources, like MetaMask, which reports its monthly active wallet users.

Conclude the researchers,

“Based on our analysis using many of the approaches described above, we estimate there are 30–60 million real monthly crypto users today. This is a wide range, obviously, but it’s our best ballpark range based on the available data.

Note that this is just 14-27% of the 220 million monthly active addresses we measured in September.

It’s also just 5-10% of the 617 million global crypto owners reported by Crypto.com in June. (Global crypto owners refer to people who own crypto, but do not necessarily transact on-chain).

This differential suggests there is a huge opportunity to convert existing crypto owners – who are mostly passive holders – into active users. As major infrastructure improvements make brand new, compelling apps and consumer experiences possible, crypto holders who are lying dormant could become re-engaged on-chain users.”

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