Crypto users worldwide 2016-2022

The global user base of cryptocurrencies increased by nearly 190 percent between 2018 and 2020, only to accelerate further in 2022. This is according to calculations from various sources, based on information from trading platforms and on-chain wallets. Increasing demographics might initially be attributed to a rise in the number of accounts and improvements in identification. In 2021, however, crypto adoption continued as companies like Tesla and Mastercard announced their interest in cryptocurrency. Consumers in Africa, Asia, and South America were most likely to be an owner of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in 2022.

How many of these users have Bitcoin?

User figures for individual cryptocurrencies are unavailable. Bitcoin, for instance, was created not to be tracked by banks and governments. What comes closest is the trading volume of Bitcoin against domestic fiat currencies. The source assumed, however, that UK residents were the most likely to make Bitcoin transactions with British pounds. This assumption might not be accurate for popular fiat currencies worldwide. On top of that, coins such as Tether or Binance Coin - referred to as "stablecoins" - are often used to buy and sell Bitcoin. Those coins were not included in that particular statistic.

Wallet usage declined

Total crypto wallet downloads were significantly lower in 2022 than in 2021. The number of downloads of Coinbase, Blockchain.com, and MetaMask, among others, declined as the market hit a "crypto winter" over the year. The crypto market also suffered bad press when FTX - one of the largest crypto exchanges based on market share - collapsed in November 2022. Binance, on the other hand, regained some of the market share it had lost between September and October 2022, growing by 0.8 percentage points in November.

Number of identity-verified cryptoasset users from 2016 to November 2022 (in millions)

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Release date

December 2022

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2016 to November 2022

Special properties

Figures as of December 1, 2022; Both sources explicitly state all figures provided are estimates, and each methodology used has its limitations

Supplementary notes

The figures have been taken from several publications:

Figures up to 2018 were from CJBS's 2nd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study - published 2018;
The figure for 2020 were from CJBS's 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study - published in September 2020;
All figures for 2021 were from Crypto.com's second iteration of its On-Chain Market Sizing report - published in July 2021;
All figures for 2021 were from Crypto.com's forecast from January 2022.
All figures for 2022 came from Crypto.com annual review from December 2022 and were calculated by Statista.

Crypto.com describes it completely revamped its methodology in July 2021 as opposed to its previous work from May 2020 - due to the acceleration of the crypto world. It remarks that it now uses on-chain data for Bitcoin and Ethereum, counting the number of on-chain deposit adresses found within the largest coin exchanges. That said, the source does openly state that its figures are "a proxy only and subjected to various limitations and caveats".

The numbers shown here from CJBS were collected by the source from "longitudinal account and user data of both small and larger service providers from publicly available sources such as press releases, news articles, company websites, and public forums. This dataset was combined with survey data from participating platforms and projects from 47 countries."

CJBS mentions the figures provided are the "lower-bound of the global cryptoasset unique user base" and adds the following information: "The analysis does not capture all accounts at service providers since no data was available for some major platforms (e.g. in China) or individuals who do not use service providers. Together, these would contribute to an underestimation of total users. On the other hand hand, there are no easy means to identify users with accounts at multiple service providers - a practice that would contribute to an overestimation. Overall, there are reasons to believe that the underestimation factors outweigh the overestimation factors, which suggest that the current figure is a conservative lower-bound estimate."

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