Where did 700 million crypto owners disappear? A16z gives the answer

? According to estimates by the A16z research team, the global crypto space looks much more modest than it seems at first glance. Despite the fact that 716 million people claim to own crypto assets, real activity is much lower. If you exclude exchange accounts, forgotten wallets, and those who bought “to try” and deleted the app, an interesting detail emerges: only 40-70 million users actively make on-chain transactions.

This is the real core of the crypto community — those who not only hold tokens on an exchange but actually use the network, send funds, try DeFi, interact with applications, participate in NFT markets, and use Web3 infrastructure as it was originally intended.

What is happening with the rest

There are another 181 million monthly active addresses. But an address is not a person. It may be: a service, an exchange, an automated wallet, a corporate tool, or a single user with a dozen “working” addresses.

So the figure looks impressive, but it does not reflect the real scale of human activity.

Where is the truth about mass crypto adoption

If you look soberly, without marketing slogans, the picture is the following:

• crypto remains a niche tool for now;
• the level of real societal engagement is still far from mass adoption;
• even one large city in Europe or Asia can have more active users of banking apps than the entire global on-chain space.

But this is exactly where the main conclusion lies: mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is still ahead.
The technology is developing, the infrastructure is improving, regulations are stabilizing, and the user experience is gradually ceasing to be an adventure “for the brave.” And when the barriers become lower, tens of millions can quite realistically turn into hundreds.

Today on-chain is roughly like the internet of the early 2000s: its capabilities are already impressive, but the audience is still far from saturation.

? In short, despite all the beautiful numbers about crypto ownership, the real picture is simple:
the crypto market is still in its early stages, and the growth potential is enormous.