Crypto is still very young. Projects are born, blaze into prominence, and fade into silence. User bases come and go, and quite frankly, a lot of people just leave their coins and tokens on exchanges or on their Trezor or Ledger Nano S, waiting for the day when they are ready to cash out. And it shows. Most projects, it turns out, still struggle to reach a few hundred active addresses on any given day.
Bitcoin Leading the Pack
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Bitcoin still dominates in adoption, with 666,000 active addresses in the last 24 hours. Not all of them will correspond to a unique user, of course, as everyone can have however many wallets they want.
But the same can be said for other currencies, and Bitcoin alone is responsible for almost half of all active wallets in the last 24 hours.
Ethereum takes second place with 293,000, followed by Litecoin and EOS at 87,000 and 69,000, respectively. The biggest surprise to many may be Dogecoin, which comes in fifth place despite not being traded on many of the largest exchanges, including Binance.
The numbers go rapidly downhill from here. According to OnChainFX, an aggregator for crypto metrics and statistics, only 20 projects broke 1000 active wallets in the last 24 hours, and only 23 reached 500. 52 projects in total saw at least 100 active addresses. And that’s really not very much for a market with a 200 billion USD market cap.
Tweet posted by Kevin Rooke shows the situation as is:
Forget about dApps with no users, let's talk about tokens with no users.
Only 27 cryptocurrencies had over 400 active addresses today. Yes. 400 users.
You'd think if there was ever a time to 'buy the dip' or 'panic sell' it would be today. 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/l1INETwawj
— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) September 6, 2018
Will Crypto Rise?
Now it’s fair to say that the bear market is making investors reluctant to trade, or to pay and receive pay for things with crypto, or even play around with dApps (which also have atrociously low activity, by the way).
There are also second layer solutions which do not show in these statistics, like the Lightning Network. But at the end of the day it goes both ways. If crypto is ever to really become mainstream, successful projects are going to have to be a lot more active than this.
Sure, some or even most of today’s top 100 cryptocurrencies might die. Maybe that will even start before we see this bear market end. But at the end of the day, the problem goes deeper than just the proliferation of shitcoins. The crypto market blew up, and speculators of all sizes swarmed in.
The technology looks very promising, but development takes time, and so does adoption. Right now, almost everyone in crypto is sitting on their bags and waiting for other people to do something. But the truth is, chances are we will have to wait for some time for many projects to reach a point where they have a product people want to actually use.
