AI transcript
(upbeat music)
October 31st, 2008.
That was the date that the Bitcoin whitepaper was released.
And in the 16 years since, well, so much has changed.
So where are we really today in the arc of crypto adoption?
Not only at the infrastructure level,
but also the applications built on top.
In today’s episode, you’ll get to hear
A16Z’s crypto team dive into their new state of crypto report.
So how many real crypto users are there?
Have gas prices come down enough
for real applications to be built on top?
And what is crypto’s relationship
to the national conversation?
Listen in to find out.
Oh, and this episode was originally published
by our sister podcast, Web3 with A16Z.
So if you are excited about the next generation
of the internet, find Web3 with A16Z
wherever you get your podcasts.
And of course, you can find a link
to the state of crypto report in our show notes.
Now over to host Robert Hackett for more.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Web3 with A16Z.
I’m Robert Hackett, and today we’ve got a special episode.
We’re taking you behind the scenes
of our newly released annual state of crypto report,
A16Z crypto’s analysis of the latest data and trends
that have defined the industry in 2024.
This year’s report features some brand new insights
from estimating the number of real crypto users globally
to understanding how much interest in crypto
swing states may have ahead of the US election.
We also dig into infrastructure improvements
to blockchains and key applications,
including stablecoins, AI, and so-called deep-in.
Be sure to visit A16Zcrypto.com for all this and more,
including a new builder energy dashboard,
which we’ll discuss on today’s show.
Joining me to talk about the findings
are our lead data scientist and report author,
Darren Matsuoka, and CTO, Eddie Lazarin.
The first voice you’ll hear after mine is Darren’s,
then Eddie’s.
As always, none of the content should be taken
as tax, business, legal, or investment advice.
See A16Z.com/disclosures for more important information,
including a link to a list of our investments.
This is our third year doing this.
We’ve put together three of these state of crypto reports.
Why do we do it?
I think we like to use this report as an opportunity
each year to really take a step back,
kind of look at the industry holistically,
analyze all of the data that we have access to,
we consult with various experts across the industry,
and ultimately bring it all together
into a single perspective.
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
And I don’t want to get too lofty with this,
but crypto as an industry was born in the social media age.
And that means that information is constantly
being streamed in real time.
So I like to see this data crypto report
as a way to pause for a second,
and sort of appreciate what’s happened in the stream.
You know, when you’re in the mix of it,
and things are getting blasted at you multiple times a day,
it can be hard to get a sense of the cumulative progress,
let alone to remember what was getting streamed to you
at full speed a year or two years ago.
So I think that data crypto report is a chance for us
to take a step out of the fire hose,
and to take a look at what’s actually transpired.
– And to that point, like our goal is not to just say
that the crypto industry is great,
and get that message out regardless of what we’re seeing,
we really try to be intellectually honest
based on data and what we’re seeing out there.
– Another thing I’ll say is that crypto has a very
overdeveloped in-group language,
not just because of the memes and the jokes
and the personalities,
but also because of the technical complexity.
All those things together create
this really strong in-group language.
And I think of our report as a way
to try to mainstream some of those big things.
We try to avoid in-group language
and make things very accessible through charts,
through very simple explanations,
and it’s an opportunity to do that too.
Also, it’s a way to shift the way people talk about crypto,
because crypto is just filled
with really difficult concepts and terms,
and to be able to kind of peel back the layers
and talk about what is actually happening
in a way that people can understand is a unique challenge.
Let’s talk about how the report opens.
So we’re trying to summarize the state of crypto
in the past year.
So first up is size in the market,
’cause if we’re talking about crypto,
the first question you might have is,
what are we talking about here?
How big is the industry?
How big is the market?
And so that’s the first question that we tackle here.
Darren, you wanna hit us off?
– Sure.
For many years in the past,
we’ve been mostly focused on building the infrastructure
to make all of this work.
And so there really wasn’t that big of a market
for users of these crypto-based applications.
But I think in 2024,
we really did hit a tipping point
with infrastructure improvements.
These blockchains are becoming more and more accessible.
They’re cheaper to use.
And as a result,
we’re starting to see applications come online.
And now that we have these applications,
I think it’s really starting to come to life.
And I think in the years to come,
this will be an increasingly important question.
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
Because beforehand,
the technology was still coming together.
And in many cases, it is still coming together,
but we’re actually beginning to see some applications.
And that’s something that if you haven’t been paying
attention to crypto, you might not realize.
– Totally.
And I think the results speak for themselves, right?
Active addresses across all of the blockchains
that we track hit an all-time high this last month
of 220 million mobile wallet users.
So data that we get from mobile app stores
that also recently hit an all-time high of 27 million.
And so the numbers do kind of speak to this idea
that we are now seeing some of these breakout applications
that are bringing real on-chain transactions and usage.
– Let’s go through each of those.
You mentioned that active addresses are at an all-time high.
Now, this is a kind of controversial metric.
Not everybody loves talking about active addresses.
One of the things they have going for them
is that they are easy to measure.
It’s something that you can very easily quantify.
– I think to really understand why active addresses
has become such a hot topic recently,
I think we need to look at some of the historical context.
I think in traditional software,
most people tend to understand the basic concept of a user.
Of course, there’s ways to measure the quality of the user.
There’s a whole field of growth analytics around this topic.
But in its most simple form,
I think people can grok the idea of a daily active user
or a monthly active user.
It’s just the number of people
that are using your product and service
on a daily or monthly basis.
It’s fairly straightforward.
But in crypto, things are a lot trickier.
And the reason is because on blockchains,
user identities are pseudonymous.
This means that it’s very easy for one person to create
and control a group of public addresses or identities.
This is called a Sibyl.
And up until recently,
a lot of the most popular blockchains
had very limited capacity,
which resulted in high transaction fees,
which created this natural barrier for spinning up
and using thousands or hundreds of different addresses,
because it would come with significant monetary costs.
But recently, we’ve seen that crypto infrastructure
has become more scalable via L2s
and new high throughput layer ones,
which has reduced the cost of transactions
on many of these blockchains to nearly zero.
And maybe you might ask,
isn’t it also near zero costs
to create multiple identities
on traditional internet applications?
And I’d say, yes, that’s true for the most part.
I can create multiple email addresses pretty easily.
But the key difference here is that in the crypto world,
we have very strong incentives for this type of behavior.
– Yeah, Google doesn’t give you money
for opening a new Gmail account, unfortunately.
– Exactly.
And a lot of new tokens today,
actually Bootstrap, they’re circulating supply
by doing something called an airdrop,
where you’re rewarding retroactively users of the protocol
based on a predefined set of addresses.
And so as long as people believe
that these tokens could be valuable,
there is a strong incentive for them
to try to game the system
by creating and transacting under many different identities.
This is commonly known as airdrop farming.
– Yeah, there’s no reason
that one person couldn’t spin up hundreds
of millions of addresses and just go wild
and engaging in totally useless and inauthentic activity
in order to try to maximize their likelihood
of extracting as many rewards as possible.
And what we’ve seen over the last four or five years
that we’ve had airdrops and yield farms and so on,
there’s been a profound professionalization
of the efforts to pull out those rewards.
People have gotten really, really, really good.
And I want to make it really clear to anybody
who thinks that it is a gigabrain take
to say monthly active addresses is simpleable.
Yes, we know that.
And if you have a better way to measure using public data,
you know, that’s verifiable by everyone
or that is easy to trust, I’d love to hear it.
Tell me a better way.
I’m thirsty for it.
Tell me, let’s work together and let’s figure it out
because the space deserves really high quality
transparent metrics and that’s what we’re trying to do.
– Yeah, and so given what we know about these behaviors,
how many users are there, right?
Is it 10 million, is it 50 million, is it 100 million?
This is the question that we put a lot of work in
and we’re going to publish some
of our thoughts around estimating them.
– And we’ll include that blog post in the show notes,
but maybe you could walk us through how you think
about actually getting from this big number,
this 220 million number.
If that’s the number of addresses,
how do we get down to humans?
How do we reduce that to the number of users,
the actual flesh and bones on the other end of the screen?
– I think one approach sounds kind of obvious,
which is, you know, we’ve got these 220 million
monthly active addresses.
What if we could filter out what we suspect
are bots and symbols?
And the way that we can do this is some techniques
using on-chain analytics and forensics.
One method is to filter out addresses that received funds
from something called a dispersion contract.
This is a smart contract whose sole purpose
is to take in funds and automatically distribute them
across many different addresses.
Of course, there could be false positives here,
but the activity implies that the destination addresses
all received funds from a single source
and therefore they’re connected in some way.
So there’s certain types of filtering you can do
around dispersion contracts specifically
that can eliminate a lot of the bots that you might see.
The other approach involves looking at addresses
that have a near zero balance at both the beginning
and end of the period that you’re aggregating over.
For example, if you’re trying to find the real number
of monthly active users in September,
you can look at addresses that had a zero balance
on both September 1st and September 30th.
This criteria implies that the addresses
were transient in nature.
I think bots and symbols typically want to clean up
their balances after taking actions on chain,
whereas real human users usually like to keep some balance
in their wallets to cover future transaction fees.
– So this is like an address popped up
and then within like some period of time,
people dumped into another thing
and the address never was revived after that.
– Exactly, this is the type of behavior
where it received a source of funds, it took some action
and then it pushed all of those funds outside.
So it’s a very transient type of activity
that’s often associated with bots and symbols.
The other thing that we’ve looked into
is just like the frequency of transactions.
And so you can analyze these distributions
to look at did the address transact one time, two times,
three times, four times, five or more times
during the period.
Addresses that have just one or two transactions,
at best they’re a low quality user,
at worst they’re a bot or a symbol
and especially over longer periods of time,
this type of analysis can help you
in some of that filtering.
You can also specifically look at addresses
that transacted very, very frequently
over very short periods of time.
Humans can only reasonably through a wallet
or app interface process a certain number of transactions
whereas bots can do things much faster.
And so you can do some filtering there.
And then on the flip side,
you can optimistically include addresses
that are tied to some sort of identity protocol
that requires some sort of setup cost.
For instance, addresses that are tied to an ENS name
or a forecaster ID or some other linked social identity
off chain, those are likely to be real human users.
So obviously it’s very complicated,
requires a lot of on-chain data and analytics and forensics
but we’ve done an internal analysis taking this approach
and I think we’ve come up with some decent estimates.
– Okay, so the first method is basically
you’re starting with the number of active addresses
and you’re trying to whittle it down
based on culling the wheat from the chaff,
culling out the addresses that seem transient,
bot-like or low quality.
– Yeah, so this is reducing the ceiling.
We know what the ceiling is,
if there’s 220 million monthly active addresses
then we’re trying to lower the ceiling.
And then we can use other methods to try to get
at a reasonable estimate of the floor.
– Okay, so let’s walk through method number two then.
So method number two says,
rather than looking at active addresses,
let’s look at some other sources of data
that we might have access to, particularly off-chain data.
And I think an obvious place to start here is wallet users.
For example, in February, MetaMask,
which is a popular Ethereum wallet,
reported that they had 30 million monthly active users
and specifically they define an active user
as someone who either loads a page
within the MetaMask extension
or opens the mobile app at least once
during any 30 day period.
And assuming that we’re looking
to estimate transacting users,
we need to make some sort of assumption
on what percentage of MetaMask users
actually end up transacting.
And that requires some research.
I don’t think we’re gonna find the perfect number.
We do have some sources that we can cite
that say that 30% of users of MetaMask,
at least on a daily basis, actually end up transacting.
And so let’s say 30 to 50 million,
you can use some sort of assumption there.
And based on that, you have 10 to 15 million users
that we believe are transacting
through the MetaMask wallet products.
And then all we need to do is try to understand
what MetaMask’s market share in the wallet space is.
Of course, the exact data here
is not gonna be readily available,
but we can make some educated guesses based on what we know.
For example, we do get pretty good estimates
of MetaMask’s market share on the mobile wallet side
based on some data that we get from Sensor Tower.
And so once we are able to estimate
what MetaMask market share is,
we can simply extrapolate an estimate
for the total number of crypto users
from that 10 to 15 million that we discussed earlier
and then compare the results to approach number one,
the filtering from active addresses
to sort of triangulate on at least a range
that we feel is in the right ballpark.
And by the way, it doesn’t just have to be MetaMask.
We can also run this exact analysis
for other wallet providers
who have either reported their numbers publicly
or are willing to share their proprietary data.
And then as I mentioned,
just kind of triangulate on a range
based on all of the information that we have.
So we have done this.
We have done this internal analysis.
It is definitely not perfect.
I’m not claiming at all
that we are super, super scientific about this,
but we feel comfortable saying
that we think there are 30 to 60 million
real monthly transacting crypto users today.
Of course, this is still a small percentage
of the monthly active addresses.
It’s 14 to 27%.
And an even smaller percentage actually
of the total number of people who own crypto,
but do not necessarily transact with crypto.
It’s actually only five to 10%
of the 617 million reported by crypto.com,
which means there’s a huge opportunity here, right?
To convert existing crypto owners
into active crypto users by bringing them on chain.
– So the point is to say is not that,
well, the civil analysis is perfect
and we can end up at a flawless classification
of which addresses are real humans and not.
The point here is to get sort of an order of magnitude range
so that we can look at growth.
That’s the goal.
The goal is to be able to look back retrospectively
and say, we’re bigger than we were last year.
We’re bigger than we were the year before that
and see approximately how things are developing.
– I also have this kind of like funny way
of thinking about this too, where I’m like,
well, maybe we’re entering this new internet world
where actually AI and bots and these things
that are farming right now for rewards
and trying to snatch up incentives
that certain projects are offering.
Maybe we’re entering an internet where like bots and AI
are just infused everywhere.
Like why are humans the major metric?
– Yeah, and look, I don’t want to get too sci-fi,
but everything is many to many now.
Everything in a networked world is many to many.
By that I mean like does one person have a credit card?
No, you have many.
Is a credit card only used by one person?
No, like there are many internet accounts, cars,
just everything is totally intertwined and entangled.
And as we add AI agents and other such things,
it’s gonna get even crazier.
In a way, what we really want is we want to measure
the attentional capacity that things command, right?
The total amount of like cognitive bandwidth
that they are commanding from the environment.
But that’s a really like sci-fi way out there,
getting kind of kooky conversation to have, Robert.
– Next year’s state of crypto report,
can you measure cognitive bandwidth?
All right, so if we’re sizing up the market,
when we’re looking at actual users
and trying to think about the people
who are using interacting with crypto on a monthly basis,
actual humans, we’re looking at around 30 to 60 million,
which is, as you said, 5 to 10% of the people
who own crypto globally,
and also a fraction of the active addresses too.
Why such a wide range?
Why 30 to 60?
Like, can you not get any more precise about it?
– I think if anybody has a problem
after they hear the methodology,
they might complain that it’s not wide enough, right?
And maybe it should be wider.
Maybe it’s 20 to 70 or 20 to 80 or something.
It’s hard to say exactly, very open to that.
We’re not pretending that this is a totally flawless analysis.
The reason for the range is just contained
in Darren’s reasoning, right?
Like, we had to make some estimates.
There’s some things you have to kind of guess,
like the ratio of monthly active users
is reported by Metamask to the proportion of them
that actually do transact per month,
thereby becoming an active address, right?
Like, those are just things that we have to estimate.
– And I think it helps even just to think
in orders of magnitude, like what we’re looking at here,
the fact that active monthly users of crypto
is about tens of millions
and global owners of crypto is hundreds of millions.
There’s a gap, there’s a gulf there,
but we’re beginning to see the sort of outline
of the market that we’re trying to size up here.
– That’s right.
– One thing that will be apparent to anybody
who looks at this report is that,
it’s not just that active addresses are at an all-time high.
It’s that there are a few blockchains
that are driving this.
One of them is Solana.
Solana is far and away,
got the most active addresses of any blockchain network
that we looked at.
It’s got 100 million or so.
What’s going on there?
– Well, I think the obvious answer here is that
the blockchains that have the most active users
are the ones that it’s cheapest to transact on, right?
And so, you know, blockchains like Solana are very, very cheap,
which means it’s very low cost to set up bots and symbols.
We also got some interesting data from the Artemis team,
and we have found that on blockchains like Solana,
a large portion of the activity is simply one-time use
or two-time use, which indicates that there is a larger
percentage of bots and symbols on these low-cost chains.
And so, I would take all of the face value,
monthly active addresses by chain data
with a big grain of salt,
because there of course is lots of nuance associated with this.
But with all that being said,
base and Solana were some of the top destinations
for crypto users in 2024.
I don’t want to take away from the great growth
and development that those ecosystems have seen this year.
– Yeah, base has the most active addresses
of any Ethereum chain that we looked at at 22 million,
exceeding even Ethereum, which has 6 million.
So clearly, they’ve struck a chord.
– Totally.
I’m also interested to see Bitcoin up there.
Like, Bitcoin’s got 11 million by our count.
– Totally, and to keep going on this point,
the cost to transact on Bitcoin is not near zero, right?
Which means there is likely to be less bots and symbols
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And so, you can kind of take that number
more at face value.
Certainly, Bitcoin has been an ecosystem
that we’ve seen more builders actually try
to build new products and applications
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And I think it’s gotten very mainstream attention
with a lot of top politicians talking about it.
So I think definitely a good year for Bitcoin.
– Definitely.
I mean, like the strategic Bitcoin reserve
once a niche idea is becoming more mainstream.
– Yeah, and to add to Darren’s point,
all in all, I think it’s a lot more difficult
to look at Bitcoin activity
and say that it’s largely driven by symbols.
I think that’s just a lot more difficult to believe.
So if activity is positive on Bitcoin,
the implication is that there’s probably an increase
in real activity across the rest of the space.
I mean, take with a grand assault,
but I think that that’s likely to be true.
– So we’re talking about some of these blockchain networks
that have had a lot of activity and interest
over the past year.
We mentioned Solano, base, even Bitcoin.
One of the most exciting things I think
about this year’s State of Crypto Report
is this segment that we’ve dedicated to builder energy.
This idea of looking at everything that founders
are telling us about where they’re building,
what they’re interested in
and where their activities and energies are directed toward.
I think that that is gonna be a mainstay feature
of future reports.
– The big context is that I think the heartbeat
of the crypto industry is, of course,
all of the builders who are building the products
and infrastructure to make this all work.
And we meet and engage with thousands of companies every year
as part of our course of business
through investment team research,
our crypto startup accelerator.
We do some external deal tracking.
And for the first time,
we now have a lot of tools internally
that allow us to normalize a lot of that data,
aggregate it in a way
that we can share some of that data externally
so that people could see the bigger trends here
across blockchains, geographies, technologies and categories.
And we’ve done that.
We’ve made actually a dashboard
that we call the builder energy dashboard.
It has some very cool interactive data visualizations
around all this data.
And you can check it out at builderenergy.a16zcrypto.com.
One thing I’ll point out is
we were talking about blockchains
that have the most active addresses.
And it’s interesting to me that it sort of lines up
with where builders are interested in building on
and what they are building on.
We’ve seen more and more builders interested in Solana
and actually building projects on Solana.
That was the biggest jump in interest
that any blockchain had seen between this year
and last year.
Base as well, super high up there.
And even Bitcoin in slot number three
had a really big bump in people who want to build on it.
– Yup, and maybe just to add one clarifying point here,
the way that we source this data comes from a question
that we ask founders and builders.
We ask them simply what blockchain ecosystems
would you be interested in building on?
So it does not mean that there are this many builders
specifically deploying contracts
or that there are a certain number of protocols
on these blockchains.
It simply just means kind of where, generally speaking,
are these builders interested in building on?
And I’d say still today, Ethereum
and all of the layer twos including base and arbitrum
and optimism and ZK sync and the others
still capture a majority of the builder mind share.
So I think those were the key takeaways from that data,
but you can check it out yourself
by looking at the dashboard.
– Excellent.
So this is an election year
and crypto has become a part of the national conversation.
People are talking about it.
Politicians are talking about it.
Candidates for the office of the president
are talking about it.
What have we found about how crypto has sort of changed
from last year when we did the report to this year
when it comes to a policy perspective?
– Yeah, so crypto has become political in this sense
that the crypto industry believes
that political engagements can help resolve
some of its major challenges.
And a big question is whether that has made it
to the mainstream or not.
Have the crypto industry’s issues become something
that some voters or enough voters care about?
– Probably for me, the most interesting slide
in the policy section of this report
is this analysis of the crypto interest
that we’re seeing within various states of the union.
Walk us through this analysis that you did here
and what you found.
– I think everybody knows that this presidential election
is shaping up to be a very tight race.
I think it will likely be decided by a handful of counties
in a handful of swing states.
And so we wanted to at least understand
is the interest based on some of the data that we have,
is it growing or shrinking across these different states?
And so we basically used Google Trends data.
We looked at a basket of search terms
that were relevant to crypto.
So we looked at Bitcoin, Ethereum and crypto.
And we looked specifically at the relative change
in search interest as defined by Google Trends
from 2020 to 2024.
And we looked at which ones increased in rank
and which states decreased in rank.
And then we basically plotted that on a map
and showed which ones had the highest growth,
which ones had the highest declines
and then basically plotted all of that data.
And I think if we look at the swing states specifically,
I think the most interesting takeaway
is that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin actually had top five.
I think they were fourth and fifth in the ranks
by change in this relative crypto related search interest
since 2020.
And these are some of the tightest races currently
as indicated by various prediction markets.
And so I think there is many different factors at play
and you need to be careful in what you conclude
from a very simple analysis like this alone.
But I think there is some evidence to suggest
that crypto is relevant here and could have an impact.
– Yeah, I mean, it’s not a sentiment analysis.
So we don’t know exactly what those people
who are searching for these crypto terms
actually think about crypto,
but we do know that they are searching for crypto terms,
which just kind of indicates general interest
and is pretty interesting to note in and of itself.
You mentioned Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the top five,
Michigan is, I believe, number eight.
So that’s in the top 10.
And then there were some declines.
Some states saw a little bit of a drop in interest.
One of those is Nevada,
a place that has the city of Las Vegas,
which is often associated with gambling.
So if there’s less crypto interest in Nevada,
I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing,
but it is really interesting to see that, yeah,
this election could come down to a few counties
in a few states, and these are places
where there is increasing interest in crypto,
especially since last election in 2020.
– And just to add clarifying detail,
all of this data is by default
from Google Trends population adjusted.
So they are representing this data
as a percentage of the total searches in the region.
We don’t actually have visibility
into the actual total numbers by state.
– That’s right, and total numbers anyway,
would be sort of skewed just toward the states
that have the biggest populations,
which wouldn’t be extremely informative.
Another really big thing that happened this year
from a policy perspective was the Bitcoin
and Ethereum exchange traded products were approved.
And I’m deliberately calling them exchange traded products,
ETPs and not ETFs because ETFs,
while they are a form of ETP,
the underlying portfolios of them would have securities,
whereas in this case, these crypto ETPs were registered
with the SEC in a way that indicates
the underlying portfolios are not securities.
Anyway, that’s a really important point,
but it is the first time we’ve ever had
these market products accessible on major stock markets.
It’s kind of a big deal.
– I think it’s a very big deal.
I think it legitimizes crypto as an asset class.
I think it puts us on a path to really having crypto
be a part of every diversified portfolio,
then just makes it much more accessible,
which I think is a good thing.
In the report, we do look at these kind of net inflow numbers
because crypto is all on chain.
We can see when the ETFs are accumulating
and distributing crypto out of these products.
They haven’t been all that high relative to expectations,
maybe it has underwhelmed a bit.
But I have talked to some experts
and they do say that getting the distributors activated
is just something that’s gonna take time.
You need to go through a long process.
You need to get it into the model portfolios.
You need to discuss it with your clients.
And I think that could be a multi-year process.
And so I’d keep an eye on those inflow numbers
over the next few years because now that we have them,
I think a tremendous tailwind for the industry.
– Yeah, I think it absolutely does broaden access
to a whole new segment of investors
that otherwise would not have dabbled with crypto beforehand.
I’m thinking about my dad for one.
He’s like, where’s the ETF?
Where’s the ETP as it were?
‘Cause he’s probably not gonna set up a hardware wallet.
All right, okay, anyway.
So let’s dig into some of the other things
we found in this report.
People always ask this question,
where are the crypto applications?
But there’s one that’s kind of been staring people
in the face for a long time.
And that is stablecoins.
Stablecoins are a product that people are using a lot.
It’s a crypto product.
I think people discount that.
– Well, stablecoins have been in crypto for a long time.
In the earlier days, people used to think of them
as something that would end up being for payments.
And very interestingly, what we found in 2021, 2022,
as the stablecoin supplies really started to pop off
was that they were primarily being used
as a means of settlement between centralized exchanges
and also as collateral for DeFi protocols.
Something people could supply and lend in a protocol
and then enable other people to borrow
and create debts denominated in dollars,
which is a lot easier to reason about
than a debt denominated in Ethereum
or some other volatile asset.
Another reason why stablecoins
make a lot of sense as collateral
is that if you’re borrowing a fair amount on chain,
it may be totally reasonable to pay a 30, 50
or even $100 transaction fee to perform that borrow
because it still may be meaningfully more affordable
than other ways to engage in an over-collateralized loan.
And that is really the type of use case that we saw
for people in the 2021 through 2023 period for stablecoins.
But as a result of the infrastructural improvements
in 2024, where lots has come online, not just 4844,
but the proliferation of L2s in Ethereum world generally.
– 4844 being the Denkun upgrade
that Ethereum went through in March of this year,
also called Proto-Dank sharding.
– Yeah, so as a result of those infrastructural improvements
as well as increasing adoption
in newer generation, newer architecture,
blockchains like Solana, Sui, many others,
now sending stablecoins in a single transaction
often costs a penny or less.
So because of this, so just this year
because of these improvements,
I think a lot of people are talking about stablecoins
as a medium for payment again.
It’s really interesting to me because
I can’t emphasize enough how in 2022,
this was just a non-start.
Everyone had given up on it.
I don’t think I heard the word payment in 2022
except to debunk the possibility
that stablecoins were being used for payments.
Whereas now it’s something that I’m hearing about
all the time and it’s not just in a conventional,
pay for your coffee with crypto setting,
although that is actually a real possibility coinbase
had to pay for a coffee with USD seed day in New York,
not long ago, it was a lot of fun.
But more concretely, now people can play with blockchains
as a piece of infrastructure to potentially bring down
interchange fees and merchant network fees,
all the types of fees that go into settling
an actual consumer payment or something.
I just pre-ordered a book from Stripe Press
with the new Stripe pay with crypto feature.
USTC on Solana was fantastic.
It was just a really straightforward experience for me.
Of course, I already have crypto on my wallet,
so that made it pretty convenient,
but these are real things.
– Right, this is because you’ve got to still onboard
to like a layer two network, say, an L2, a rollup,
where the fees would be lower.
But once you’re there, it becomes quite seamless
to transact and move around.
– Yeah, and there’s still very meaningful UX challenges.
But the point is to say is like now this is in the story
and there’s a lot of crypto projects
that are interested in trying to improve payments
or aspects of payments or take advantage
of the ease of settling payments internationally,
computationally, there’s all kinds of ways
that payments really ought to be programmed
and experimented with.
And now just this year, that’s a possibility.
So just to set people’s expectations
like the way I like to think about it is
now that there is a glut of supply
for being able to transact stablecoin,
dollar denominated payments.
How long will it take for builders
to consume that extra supply
in terms of interesting applications?
It’s not instant.
People don’t realize this.
People kind of like see new technology.
It sort of appears.
But from my perspective, it takes at a minimum six months
to start to see people really talk about it.
And then it takes about two years
for people to soak up all of the excess.
This reminds me a lot of the mid-wit meme
where it’s like maybe it is as simple as just,
when the fees come down, stablecoins work well.
When the fees are really high, stablecoins kind of suck.
And so I think to all of the points that Eddie made in 2024,
we made a ton of infrastructure improvements.
It brought fees down just to share some data
from our report on this.
In 2021, to send USDC on Ethereum
using the average gas price, it was about $12.
And that’s a lot of money.
That was like my lunch that I just had today.
– Yeah, and as people took for granted,
that’s obviously totally unacceptable for a payment setting.
Unless you’re moving like tens of thousands of dollars,
then it actually may be better.
But there’s a smaller number of people
who are in that situation.
– Definitely.
Today, if you use USDC on Ethereum post EIP4844,
it’s like $1.
But if you use USDC on base, which is a layer two,
it’s less than a cent, right?
And so that makes all the difference
when it comes to stablecoin adoption.
And it’s no coincidence that 2024 was the year
that stablecoins found product market fit.
And I think because it’s as simple as just
the infrastructure got better,
these came down and now it works.
– It’s really amazing to wrap your head around this
that just a few years ago, it cost $12 to transact.
– Exactly, it totally changes the applications
that are possible.
And I think there’s a number of examples
that we can point to that are only now possible
in a low fee environment.
And we do our best to highlight
those emerging applications in the report.
– This doesn’t just speak to stablecoins.
It also speaks to other sorts of applications
that weren’t possible before.
I mean, I would say the most striking thing to me
in this report compared to past reports was,
look, NFTs were going crazy a few years ago.
The secondary markets, NFTs were trading on them
for billions of dollars regularly.
That activity has subsided.
But now because fees have come down,
we’re seeing totally different sorts of consumer behaviors
arise around NFTs.
I think a lot of people might think that NFTs happened
and then they went away and they’re over and done.
And your sort of mainstream listener here
might not realize that they’ve actually stuck around
and they’re just game traction
in a completely different context.
– Being honest, the NFT market has faced
some pretty tremendous challenges.
There was a lot of speculative activity in prior years.
Very high trading volume, high priced premium collections.
We definitely got over our skis a bit as an industry.
As a result, we’ve seen a 90 plus percent decrease
in trading volume over the last few years.
There’s been a ton of drama around
how creators can enforce royalties.
And so we have faced a lot of challenges.
And I think there are some data points that you can look at
that say, wow, the NFT market really is not what it once was.
And I think that is very true in all senses.
But I think what’s also happened at the same time
is to the point we were just discussing
about the infrastructure getting better.
These infrastructure improvements enabled NFTs
to be exchanged and traded and interacted with
at much lower costs, which really kind of shifted
the behavior away from these high volume,
high price speculative secondary markets
into these newer low cost social collecting experiences.
For example, if you look at the number of NFT collections
with 50 plus unique mentors, the trend is actually very positive.
It means that people are still interacting
and using these NFTs and collecting these NFTs,
but they’re doing it much different than they had in prior years.
And this is only possible in a low fee environment.
You can look at products like Zora today.
You can look at products like Rodeo today.
And there are some really fascinating,
cool, new emerging cultural behaviors
around this social collecting
that I think many people would find really interesting.
And so I would say the NFT market is very much alive,
but I think behavior has shifted.
And I think it’s all driven by the infrastructure developments
in 2024.
Yeah, I don’t know that there’s a perfect way
to communicate what this new behavior is
other than people like to collect stuff.
And on a social network,
you’re probably familiar with liking hosts.
And I’ve heard people describe this new sort
of social collecting experience
as a kind of super like behavior
where you are just expressing
that you’re interested in something.
And critically, it’s on the order of magnitude
of like one to two cents per collecting.
In prior years, we were paying tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of dollars,
which of course, only very few people can afford.
But now we’re opening it up to a much broader audience,
which I think is a net positive for the NFT market.
We got to recall that the way crypto has developed
is the first thing that you can do.
And actually the simplest thing to do computationally
is just to buy and own the thing.
That is the novel component,
is being able to directly own the underlying asset
on this big shared-state computer.
Doing more complicated things like transacting
or mutating the state of a program,
these require much more computational capacity
in addition to creativity from application designers,
in addition to user experience improvements
to make it easier to do those things.
We’re seeing advances on all of those fronts.
And so you should expect the complexity
of what people do with blockchains to increase over time,
starting from the simplest, which is just owning
and moving to the more complex things,
interacting with programs.
– Even just the mentorship that it takes
to understand what is activity on a blockchain,
it’s affected by this evolution,
where it’s not just a money payment system,
it’s actually a shared-state computer, as you called it, Eddie.
And these interactions can be interactions with applications,
just like people are interacting
with websites or something.
All these interactions can be much more expansive
than this sort of limited view of crypto,
just as like a money thing.
– Yeah, and I want to sketch out,
there’s a pattern to how these things unfold, right?
Just buying an NFT when the costs are very high.
That’s the simplest thing you can do,
that’s the best supported thing you can do,
and that’s probably the only thing
that’s reasonable to afford.
But NFTs are programmable.
Experimenting with what that looks like requires low gas fees.
So what I expect, like the exact pattern I would expect,
would be speculative boom with very simple uses
where most of the interesting things that happen
in the very, very earliest stages
are actually the themes and the ideas that come through,
as people sort of imagine what’s possible.
You see glimmers of very exciting things.
Of course, then they run into the pragmatic reality
that it’s too expensive, it’s developing too slow,
there are certain pragmatic limits.
As those things scale, then experimentation returns,
and then as experimentation develops,
more complex and interesting applications
start to take place.
We just described that with stablecoins.
The exact same thing is gonna happen with NFTs
and with all these different settings.
It’s not a crypto specific thing.
I think that’s how AI is developing as well.
– Because you mentioned AI,
I think people listening will recognize
that AI is one of the biggest trends of the past year.
But what’s interesting is that it’s not just a trend within tech,
it’s also a trend within crypto.
Maybe it’s unsurprising that crypto influencers
are talking about AI.
But what is more surprising is that the people
likely as to visit the websites of various AI tools
like chatGPT are also the likeliest to visit
some of the top crypto websites out there.
And that goes to this sort of inference
that could possibly be drawn that there is strong overlap
between the user bases of these kind of frontier technologies.
– Yeah, I mean, definitely it’s a hot area.
And AI was clearly the breakaway narrative in 2024,
even among crypto social circles relative to other topics.
And so clearly people are thinking about this.
And a lot of the top crypto sites
are highly, highly overlapping with chatGPT.com,
which indicates that there may be an overlap
in crypto and AI users.
And the fact that there is, I do think reinforces this point
that it’s a hot area.
And I think we should expect to see more innovation
in this pocket of crypto specifically.
– So let’s cover some more emerging applications.
The cost of transacting on blockchain networks
is coming down, like we said.
It can cost as little as cents on the dollar now,
or even less than a cent.
Just a tremendous plummeting of costs there.
What other territory does this open up?
– Yeah, some areas that have popped up include Deepin.
There are new forming marketplaces for energy,
for wireless bandwidth, for mapping,
for weather, for food delivery.
– This is decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
So it’s where the digital world meets the physical world,
like using a digital overlay to manage resources
in the physical world.
– Yeah, and the difference, of course,
we have these things like with Uber and Lyft and so on.
You could call those like Web 2 Deepin networks.
The key difference is that in a blockchain,
there’s a degree of credible neutrality
about the underlying platform.
That means that people who build on top of it,
including not just the suppliers of the good,
and not just the people buying it,
but also people who build applications
to make the whole thing work better,
can take for granted what they’re building on,
and not risk being rent collected
or sure locked by the underlying platform.
And if you can make payments affordably,
if you can update reputation systems,
incorporate all kinds of interesting identity systems,
all these things that these marketplaces need,
then they can finally exist.
So those have been emerging.
Maybe a final category, which we give a little glimpse of
in the report is Decentralized Social Networks,
Farkaster, which is another portfolio company of ours.
It’s an incredible place for builders to experiment
with different types of tools, different types of toys,
to extend and improve the experience
for all types of users.
And I know for a fact,
just having spent a bunch of time with the Farkaster team,
that they are totally capacity limited.
They’re working really hard to allow the network
to post more and more people while remaining
totally decentralized.
And you can see in their report,
a lot of projects where people have been experimenting
with software on top of this network.
– Even in our Builder Energy dashboard,
we’re seeing that a lot of builders
are interested in social networks.
I think 10% of the founders that we’ve talked to
and looked at are building social related projects.
So I think people see this opportunity
and they expect that it’s gonna be a thing,
given how big it was in web two.
– Yeah, then there’s prediction markets,
of course those have been huge this year.
No surprise, given the incredible dynamics
and volatility related to the election.
– Yeah, prediction markets is an idea
that people have been talking about for decades,
but have been hamstrung.
And people are actually coming around to their value
in ability to source up knowledge
from disparate parts of the world
and kind of get a better, more informed picture
of the state of the world and how things might shake out.
It’s interesting to see that it’s actually finally
getting some traction when it’s a very old idea
that has been stalled for so long.
All right, Eddie, we’ve been putting out reports
for three years, what’s been most surprising looking
at this year’s report compared to earlier reports?
– I don’t know, stepping back, I’d say,
when we’re deep in the mix, like we are,
it often feels like nothing is coming fast enough.
I feel that all the time.
I want it right now, I want it right now, I’m sick of waiting.
And there are some areas that have definitely lagged,
but at the same time, it is a little bit unbelievable
when you look back at the progress.
Let’s be very conservative in our estimates.
And let’s say we have 30 million monthly active users
of blockchains, that’s pretty damn good.
Like I’m pretty happy with where that is,
given the historical infrastructural limits.
Like about a year ago, we were all debating
how long it would take things to start to heat up
in terms of on-chain usage.
And where I ended up was that six months after Dencun,
six months after 4844, is when we’d start to see
like new types of stories,
because that’s about how long it takes.
And we’re just like six months after.
And I think that that’s exactly what’s happening.
Like I think the payments thing is one of those things.
And I think some of these new networks,
some of these like deep in networks are examples of that.
– So it feels very on track to me,
and I’m very pleased with that.
That’s kind of surprising, maybe in a certain way.
That is surprising to me that it feels very
kinda like we are thinking it’s going to unfold.
– If you had to cast your prediction a year ahead,
what do you think is gonna be the theme
of State of Crypto 2025?
– I hope that all the extra block spaces filled
with something, something productive.
That’s what I hope it’s about.
It’s about what fills that block space.
We just started creating all these L2s and new blockchains.
And maybe something that we didn’t put in the report
’cause it can be challenging to present
in a very straightforward way.
But bridges are great for people in crypto.
You know that three years ago,
there were very few bridges and they were terrible
and they were slow and they were expensive
and they were error prone.
There’s just a lot wrong with them.
Now bridges, there’s myriad options,
really high quality, fast, super affordable,
great connectivity.
That’s like no question.
Anyone in crypto would agree with that.
Well, now that we have good bridges
and now that we’ve got L2s,
we’re getting tons more L2s and tons more bridges
and tons more interoperability questions and fragmentation.
So as always happens with technology,
you solve one problem, you create another.
I’m beginning to see signs
that there are really, really great strategies
to solve interoperability.
And so I hope the combination of good interoperability
plus good block space means finally great user experience
for a family of applications.
If that was the case at the end of 2025,
I’d be really pleased.
– That’s great for the wish list.
I really hope that in the coming years,
our section on infrastructure gets smaller
and our section on applications gets bigger.
I think there’s still a place to report
on key infrastructure developments,
which I think will continue to happen
over the coming years,
but I think it should be hopefully more about
how do we just overall improve the user experience?
There’s count abstraction protocols, interoperability,
various developments that we can report on.
But I hope that that is not the main story.
I hope the main story of 2025 and the year’s following
is that we now have a new set of applications
that are proving to be real use cases for this technology
that is attracting people.
And so that is my hope for the years to come.
We’ve made a lot of progress on infrastructure,
but hopefully from here going forward,
the improvements are more on the margin.
– Maybe in the years ahead,
there won’t even be a need for a state of crypto report.
We will all just be using these applications
and won’t even know that there’s crypto on the backend.
– Could be.
– We’ll have to wait to know for sure.
Thank you both for joining.
– Thank you, Robert.
– Thank you, Robert.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
you
October 31st, 2008.
That was the date that the Bitcoin whitepaper was released.
And in the 16 years since, well, so much has changed.
So where are we really today in the arc of crypto adoption?
Not only at the infrastructure level,
but also the applications built on top.
In today’s episode, you’ll get to hear
A16Z’s crypto team dive into their new state of crypto report.
So how many real crypto users are there?
Have gas prices come down enough
for real applications to be built on top?
And what is crypto’s relationship
to the national conversation?
Listen in to find out.
Oh, and this episode was originally published
by our sister podcast, Web3 with A16Z.
So if you are excited about the next generation
of the internet, find Web3 with A16Z
wherever you get your podcasts.
And of course, you can find a link
to the state of crypto report in our show notes.
Now over to host Robert Hackett for more.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Web3 with A16Z.
I’m Robert Hackett, and today we’ve got a special episode.
We’re taking you behind the scenes
of our newly released annual state of crypto report,
A16Z crypto’s analysis of the latest data and trends
that have defined the industry in 2024.
This year’s report features some brand new insights
from estimating the number of real crypto users globally
to understanding how much interest in crypto
swing states may have ahead of the US election.
We also dig into infrastructure improvements
to blockchains and key applications,
including stablecoins, AI, and so-called deep-in.
Be sure to visit A16Zcrypto.com for all this and more,
including a new builder energy dashboard,
which we’ll discuss on today’s show.
Joining me to talk about the findings
are our lead data scientist and report author,
Darren Matsuoka, and CTO, Eddie Lazarin.
The first voice you’ll hear after mine is Darren’s,
then Eddie’s.
As always, none of the content should be taken
as tax, business, legal, or investment advice.
See A16Z.com/disclosures for more important information,
including a link to a list of our investments.
This is our third year doing this.
We’ve put together three of these state of crypto reports.
Why do we do it?
I think we like to use this report as an opportunity
each year to really take a step back,
kind of look at the industry holistically,
analyze all of the data that we have access to,
we consult with various experts across the industry,
and ultimately bring it all together
into a single perspective.
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
And I don’t want to get too lofty with this,
but crypto as an industry was born in the social media age.
And that means that information is constantly
being streamed in real time.
So I like to see this data crypto report
as a way to pause for a second,
and sort of appreciate what’s happened in the stream.
You know, when you’re in the mix of it,
and things are getting blasted at you multiple times a day,
it can be hard to get a sense of the cumulative progress,
let alone to remember what was getting streamed to you
at full speed a year or two years ago.
So I think that data crypto report is a chance for us
to take a step out of the fire hose,
and to take a look at what’s actually transpired.
– And to that point, like our goal is not to just say
that the crypto industry is great,
and get that message out regardless of what we’re seeing,
we really try to be intellectually honest
based on data and what we’re seeing out there.
– Another thing I’ll say is that crypto has a very
overdeveloped in-group language,
not just because of the memes and the jokes
and the personalities,
but also because of the technical complexity.
All those things together create
this really strong in-group language.
And I think of our report as a way
to try to mainstream some of those big things.
We try to avoid in-group language
and make things very accessible through charts,
through very simple explanations,
and it’s an opportunity to do that too.
Also, it’s a way to shift the way people talk about crypto,
because crypto is just filled
with really difficult concepts and terms,
and to be able to kind of peel back the layers
and talk about what is actually happening
in a way that people can understand is a unique challenge.
Let’s talk about how the report opens.
So we’re trying to summarize the state of crypto
in the past year.
So first up is size in the market,
’cause if we’re talking about crypto,
the first question you might have is,
what are we talking about here?
How big is the industry?
How big is the market?
And so that’s the first question that we tackle here.
Darren, you wanna hit us off?
– Sure.
For many years in the past,
we’ve been mostly focused on building the infrastructure
to make all of this work.
And so there really wasn’t that big of a market
for users of these crypto-based applications.
But I think in 2024,
we really did hit a tipping point
with infrastructure improvements.
These blockchains are becoming more and more accessible.
They’re cheaper to use.
And as a result,
we’re starting to see applications come online.
And now that we have these applications,
I think it’s really starting to come to life.
And I think in the years to come,
this will be an increasingly important question.
– Yeah, I think that’s right.
Because beforehand,
the technology was still coming together.
And in many cases, it is still coming together,
but we’re actually beginning to see some applications.
And that’s something that if you haven’t been paying
attention to crypto, you might not realize.
– Totally.
And I think the results speak for themselves, right?
Active addresses across all of the blockchains
that we track hit an all-time high this last month
of 220 million mobile wallet users.
So data that we get from mobile app stores
that also recently hit an all-time high of 27 million.
And so the numbers do kind of speak to this idea
that we are now seeing some of these breakout applications
that are bringing real on-chain transactions and usage.
– Let’s go through each of those.
You mentioned that active addresses are at an all-time high.
Now, this is a kind of controversial metric.
Not everybody loves talking about active addresses.
One of the things they have going for them
is that they are easy to measure.
It’s something that you can very easily quantify.
– I think to really understand why active addresses
has become such a hot topic recently,
I think we need to look at some of the historical context.
I think in traditional software,
most people tend to understand the basic concept of a user.
Of course, there’s ways to measure the quality of the user.
There’s a whole field of growth analytics around this topic.
But in its most simple form,
I think people can grok the idea of a daily active user
or a monthly active user.
It’s just the number of people
that are using your product and service
on a daily or monthly basis.
It’s fairly straightforward.
But in crypto, things are a lot trickier.
And the reason is because on blockchains,
user identities are pseudonymous.
This means that it’s very easy for one person to create
and control a group of public addresses or identities.
This is called a Sibyl.
And up until recently,
a lot of the most popular blockchains
had very limited capacity,
which resulted in high transaction fees,
which created this natural barrier for spinning up
and using thousands or hundreds of different addresses,
because it would come with significant monetary costs.
But recently, we’ve seen that crypto infrastructure
has become more scalable via L2s
and new high throughput layer ones,
which has reduced the cost of transactions
on many of these blockchains to nearly zero.
And maybe you might ask,
isn’t it also near zero costs
to create multiple identities
on traditional internet applications?
And I’d say, yes, that’s true for the most part.
I can create multiple email addresses pretty easily.
But the key difference here is that in the crypto world,
we have very strong incentives for this type of behavior.
– Yeah, Google doesn’t give you money
for opening a new Gmail account, unfortunately.
– Exactly.
And a lot of new tokens today,
actually Bootstrap, they’re circulating supply
by doing something called an airdrop,
where you’re rewarding retroactively users of the protocol
based on a predefined set of addresses.
And so as long as people believe
that these tokens could be valuable,
there is a strong incentive for them
to try to game the system
by creating and transacting under many different identities.
This is commonly known as airdrop farming.
– Yeah, there’s no reason
that one person couldn’t spin up hundreds
of millions of addresses and just go wild
and engaging in totally useless and inauthentic activity
in order to try to maximize their likelihood
of extracting as many rewards as possible.
And what we’ve seen over the last four or five years
that we’ve had airdrops and yield farms and so on,
there’s been a profound professionalization
of the efforts to pull out those rewards.
People have gotten really, really, really good.
And I want to make it really clear to anybody
who thinks that it is a gigabrain take
to say monthly active addresses is simpleable.
Yes, we know that.
And if you have a better way to measure using public data,
you know, that’s verifiable by everyone
or that is easy to trust, I’d love to hear it.
Tell me a better way.
I’m thirsty for it.
Tell me, let’s work together and let’s figure it out
because the space deserves really high quality
transparent metrics and that’s what we’re trying to do.
– Yeah, and so given what we know about these behaviors,
how many users are there, right?
Is it 10 million, is it 50 million, is it 100 million?
This is the question that we put a lot of work in
and we’re going to publish some
of our thoughts around estimating them.
– And we’ll include that blog post in the show notes,
but maybe you could walk us through how you think
about actually getting from this big number,
this 220 million number.
If that’s the number of addresses,
how do we get down to humans?
How do we reduce that to the number of users,
the actual flesh and bones on the other end of the screen?
– I think one approach sounds kind of obvious,
which is, you know, we’ve got these 220 million
monthly active addresses.
What if we could filter out what we suspect
are bots and symbols?
And the way that we can do this is some techniques
using on-chain analytics and forensics.
One method is to filter out addresses that received funds
from something called a dispersion contract.
This is a smart contract whose sole purpose
is to take in funds and automatically distribute them
across many different addresses.
Of course, there could be false positives here,
but the activity implies that the destination addresses
all received funds from a single source
and therefore they’re connected in some way.
So there’s certain types of filtering you can do
around dispersion contracts specifically
that can eliminate a lot of the bots that you might see.
The other approach involves looking at addresses
that have a near zero balance at both the beginning
and end of the period that you’re aggregating over.
For example, if you’re trying to find the real number
of monthly active users in September,
you can look at addresses that had a zero balance
on both September 1st and September 30th.
This criteria implies that the addresses
were transient in nature.
I think bots and symbols typically want to clean up
their balances after taking actions on chain,
whereas real human users usually like to keep some balance
in their wallets to cover future transaction fees.
– So this is like an address popped up
and then within like some period of time,
people dumped into another thing
and the address never was revived after that.
– Exactly, this is the type of behavior
where it received a source of funds, it took some action
and then it pushed all of those funds outside.
So it’s a very transient type of activity
that’s often associated with bots and symbols.
The other thing that we’ve looked into
is just like the frequency of transactions.
And so you can analyze these distributions
to look at did the address transact one time, two times,
three times, four times, five or more times
during the period.
Addresses that have just one or two transactions,
at best they’re a low quality user,
at worst they’re a bot or a symbol
and especially over longer periods of time,
this type of analysis can help you
in some of that filtering.
You can also specifically look at addresses
that transacted very, very frequently
over very short periods of time.
Humans can only reasonably through a wallet
or app interface process a certain number of transactions
whereas bots can do things much faster.
And so you can do some filtering there.
And then on the flip side,
you can optimistically include addresses
that are tied to some sort of identity protocol
that requires some sort of setup cost.
For instance, addresses that are tied to an ENS name
or a forecaster ID or some other linked social identity
off chain, those are likely to be real human users.
So obviously it’s very complicated,
requires a lot of on-chain data and analytics and forensics
but we’ve done an internal analysis taking this approach
and I think we’ve come up with some decent estimates.
– Okay, so the first method is basically
you’re starting with the number of active addresses
and you’re trying to whittle it down
based on culling the wheat from the chaff,
culling out the addresses that seem transient,
bot-like or low quality.
– Yeah, so this is reducing the ceiling.
We know what the ceiling is,
if there’s 220 million monthly active addresses
then we’re trying to lower the ceiling.
And then we can use other methods to try to get
at a reasonable estimate of the floor.
– Okay, so let’s walk through method number two then.
So method number two says,
rather than looking at active addresses,
let’s look at some other sources of data
that we might have access to, particularly off-chain data.
And I think an obvious place to start here is wallet users.
For example, in February, MetaMask,
which is a popular Ethereum wallet,
reported that they had 30 million monthly active users
and specifically they define an active user
as someone who either loads a page
within the MetaMask extension
or opens the mobile app at least once
during any 30 day period.
And assuming that we’re looking
to estimate transacting users,
we need to make some sort of assumption
on what percentage of MetaMask users
actually end up transacting.
And that requires some research.
I don’t think we’re gonna find the perfect number.
We do have some sources that we can cite
that say that 30% of users of MetaMask,
at least on a daily basis, actually end up transacting.
And so let’s say 30 to 50 million,
you can use some sort of assumption there.
And based on that, you have 10 to 15 million users
that we believe are transacting
through the MetaMask wallet products.
And then all we need to do is try to understand
what MetaMask’s market share in the wallet space is.
Of course, the exact data here
is not gonna be readily available,
but we can make some educated guesses based on what we know.
For example, we do get pretty good estimates
of MetaMask’s market share on the mobile wallet side
based on some data that we get from Sensor Tower.
And so once we are able to estimate
what MetaMask market share is,
we can simply extrapolate an estimate
for the total number of crypto users
from that 10 to 15 million that we discussed earlier
and then compare the results to approach number one,
the filtering from active addresses
to sort of triangulate on at least a range
that we feel is in the right ballpark.
And by the way, it doesn’t just have to be MetaMask.
We can also run this exact analysis
for other wallet providers
who have either reported their numbers publicly
or are willing to share their proprietary data.
And then as I mentioned,
just kind of triangulate on a range
based on all of the information that we have.
So we have done this.
We have done this internal analysis.
It is definitely not perfect.
I’m not claiming at all
that we are super, super scientific about this,
but we feel comfortable saying
that we think there are 30 to 60 million
real monthly transacting crypto users today.
Of course, this is still a small percentage
of the monthly active addresses.
It’s 14 to 27%.
And an even smaller percentage actually
of the total number of people who own crypto,
but do not necessarily transact with crypto.
It’s actually only five to 10%
of the 617 million reported by crypto.com,
which means there’s a huge opportunity here, right?
To convert existing crypto owners
into active crypto users by bringing them on chain.
– So the point is to say is not that,
well, the civil analysis is perfect
and we can end up at a flawless classification
of which addresses are real humans and not.
The point here is to get sort of an order of magnitude range
so that we can look at growth.
That’s the goal.
The goal is to be able to look back retrospectively
and say, we’re bigger than we were last year.
We’re bigger than we were the year before that
and see approximately how things are developing.
– I also have this kind of like funny way
of thinking about this too, where I’m like,
well, maybe we’re entering this new internet world
where actually AI and bots and these things
that are farming right now for rewards
and trying to snatch up incentives
that certain projects are offering.
Maybe we’re entering an internet where like bots and AI
are just infused everywhere.
Like why are humans the major metric?
– Yeah, and look, I don’t want to get too sci-fi,
but everything is many to many now.
Everything in a networked world is many to many.
By that I mean like does one person have a credit card?
No, you have many.
Is a credit card only used by one person?
No, like there are many internet accounts, cars,
just everything is totally intertwined and entangled.
And as we add AI agents and other such things,
it’s gonna get even crazier.
In a way, what we really want is we want to measure
the attentional capacity that things command, right?
The total amount of like cognitive bandwidth
that they are commanding from the environment.
But that’s a really like sci-fi way out there,
getting kind of kooky conversation to have, Robert.
– Next year’s state of crypto report,
can you measure cognitive bandwidth?
All right, so if we’re sizing up the market,
when we’re looking at actual users
and trying to think about the people
who are using interacting with crypto on a monthly basis,
actual humans, we’re looking at around 30 to 60 million,
which is, as you said, 5 to 10% of the people
who own crypto globally,
and also a fraction of the active addresses too.
Why such a wide range?
Why 30 to 60?
Like, can you not get any more precise about it?
– I think if anybody has a problem
after they hear the methodology,
they might complain that it’s not wide enough, right?
And maybe it should be wider.
Maybe it’s 20 to 70 or 20 to 80 or something.
It’s hard to say exactly, very open to that.
We’re not pretending that this is a totally flawless analysis.
The reason for the range is just contained
in Darren’s reasoning, right?
Like, we had to make some estimates.
There’s some things you have to kind of guess,
like the ratio of monthly active users
is reported by Metamask to the proportion of them
that actually do transact per month,
thereby becoming an active address, right?
Like, those are just things that we have to estimate.
– And I think it helps even just to think
in orders of magnitude, like what we’re looking at here,
the fact that active monthly users of crypto
is about tens of millions
and global owners of crypto is hundreds of millions.
There’s a gap, there’s a gulf there,
but we’re beginning to see the sort of outline
of the market that we’re trying to size up here.
– That’s right.
– One thing that will be apparent to anybody
who looks at this report is that,
it’s not just that active addresses are at an all-time high.
It’s that there are a few blockchains
that are driving this.
One of them is Solana.
Solana is far and away,
got the most active addresses of any blockchain network
that we looked at.
It’s got 100 million or so.
What’s going on there?
– Well, I think the obvious answer here is that
the blockchains that have the most active users
are the ones that it’s cheapest to transact on, right?
And so, you know, blockchains like Solana are very, very cheap,
which means it’s very low cost to set up bots and symbols.
We also got some interesting data from the Artemis team,
and we have found that on blockchains like Solana,
a large portion of the activity is simply one-time use
or two-time use, which indicates that there is a larger
percentage of bots and symbols on these low-cost chains.
And so, I would take all of the face value,
monthly active addresses by chain data
with a big grain of salt,
because there of course is lots of nuance associated with this.
But with all that being said,
base and Solana were some of the top destinations
for crypto users in 2024.
I don’t want to take away from the great growth
and development that those ecosystems have seen this year.
– Yeah, base has the most active addresses
of any Ethereum chain that we looked at at 22 million,
exceeding even Ethereum, which has 6 million.
So clearly, they’ve struck a chord.
– Totally.
I’m also interested to see Bitcoin up there.
Like, Bitcoin’s got 11 million by our count.
– Totally, and to keep going on this point,
the cost to transact on Bitcoin is not near zero, right?
Which means there is likely to be less bots and symbols
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And so, you can kind of take that number
more at face value.
Certainly, Bitcoin has been an ecosystem
that we’ve seen more builders actually try
to build new products and applications
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
And I think it’s gotten very mainstream attention
with a lot of top politicians talking about it.
So I think definitely a good year for Bitcoin.
– Definitely.
I mean, like the strategic Bitcoin reserve
once a niche idea is becoming more mainstream.
– Yeah, and to add to Darren’s point,
all in all, I think it’s a lot more difficult
to look at Bitcoin activity
and say that it’s largely driven by symbols.
I think that’s just a lot more difficult to believe.
So if activity is positive on Bitcoin,
the implication is that there’s probably an increase
in real activity across the rest of the space.
I mean, take with a grand assault,
but I think that that’s likely to be true.
– So we’re talking about some of these blockchain networks
that have had a lot of activity and interest
over the past year.
We mentioned Solano, base, even Bitcoin.
One of the most exciting things I think
about this year’s State of Crypto Report
is this segment that we’ve dedicated to builder energy.
This idea of looking at everything that founders
are telling us about where they’re building,
what they’re interested in
and where their activities and energies are directed toward.
I think that that is gonna be a mainstay feature
of future reports.
– The big context is that I think the heartbeat
of the crypto industry is, of course,
all of the builders who are building the products
and infrastructure to make this all work.
And we meet and engage with thousands of companies every year
as part of our course of business
through investment team research,
our crypto startup accelerator.
We do some external deal tracking.
And for the first time,
we now have a lot of tools internally
that allow us to normalize a lot of that data,
aggregate it in a way
that we can share some of that data externally
so that people could see the bigger trends here
across blockchains, geographies, technologies and categories.
And we’ve done that.
We’ve made actually a dashboard
that we call the builder energy dashboard.
It has some very cool interactive data visualizations
around all this data.
And you can check it out at builderenergy.a16zcrypto.com.
One thing I’ll point out is
we were talking about blockchains
that have the most active addresses.
And it’s interesting to me that it sort of lines up
with where builders are interested in building on
and what they are building on.
We’ve seen more and more builders interested in Solana
and actually building projects on Solana.
That was the biggest jump in interest
that any blockchain had seen between this year
and last year.
Base as well, super high up there.
And even Bitcoin in slot number three
had a really big bump in people who want to build on it.
– Yup, and maybe just to add one clarifying point here,
the way that we source this data comes from a question
that we ask founders and builders.
We ask them simply what blockchain ecosystems
would you be interested in building on?
So it does not mean that there are this many builders
specifically deploying contracts
or that there are a certain number of protocols
on these blockchains.
It simply just means kind of where, generally speaking,
are these builders interested in building on?
And I’d say still today, Ethereum
and all of the layer twos including base and arbitrum
and optimism and ZK sync and the others
still capture a majority of the builder mind share.
So I think those were the key takeaways from that data,
but you can check it out yourself
by looking at the dashboard.
– Excellent.
So this is an election year
and crypto has become a part of the national conversation.
People are talking about it.
Politicians are talking about it.
Candidates for the office of the president
are talking about it.
What have we found about how crypto has sort of changed
from last year when we did the report to this year
when it comes to a policy perspective?
– Yeah, so crypto has become political in this sense
that the crypto industry believes
that political engagements can help resolve
some of its major challenges.
And a big question is whether that has made it
to the mainstream or not.
Have the crypto industry’s issues become something
that some voters or enough voters care about?
– Probably for me, the most interesting slide
in the policy section of this report
is this analysis of the crypto interest
that we’re seeing within various states of the union.
Walk us through this analysis that you did here
and what you found.
– I think everybody knows that this presidential election
is shaping up to be a very tight race.
I think it will likely be decided by a handful of counties
in a handful of swing states.
And so we wanted to at least understand
is the interest based on some of the data that we have,
is it growing or shrinking across these different states?
And so we basically used Google Trends data.
We looked at a basket of search terms
that were relevant to crypto.
So we looked at Bitcoin, Ethereum and crypto.
And we looked specifically at the relative change
in search interest as defined by Google Trends
from 2020 to 2024.
And we looked at which ones increased in rank
and which states decreased in rank.
And then we basically plotted that on a map
and showed which ones had the highest growth,
which ones had the highest declines
and then basically plotted all of that data.
And I think if we look at the swing states specifically,
I think the most interesting takeaway
is that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin actually had top five.
I think they were fourth and fifth in the ranks
by change in this relative crypto related search interest
since 2020.
And these are some of the tightest races currently
as indicated by various prediction markets.
And so I think there is many different factors at play
and you need to be careful in what you conclude
from a very simple analysis like this alone.
But I think there is some evidence to suggest
that crypto is relevant here and could have an impact.
– Yeah, I mean, it’s not a sentiment analysis.
So we don’t know exactly what those people
who are searching for these crypto terms
actually think about crypto,
but we do know that they are searching for crypto terms,
which just kind of indicates general interest
and is pretty interesting to note in and of itself.
You mentioned Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and the top five,
Michigan is, I believe, number eight.
So that’s in the top 10.
And then there were some declines.
Some states saw a little bit of a drop in interest.
One of those is Nevada,
a place that has the city of Las Vegas,
which is often associated with gambling.
So if there’s less crypto interest in Nevada,
I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing,
but it is really interesting to see that, yeah,
this election could come down to a few counties
in a few states, and these are places
where there is increasing interest in crypto,
especially since last election in 2020.
– And just to add clarifying detail,
all of this data is by default
from Google Trends population adjusted.
So they are representing this data
as a percentage of the total searches in the region.
We don’t actually have visibility
into the actual total numbers by state.
– That’s right, and total numbers anyway,
would be sort of skewed just toward the states
that have the biggest populations,
which wouldn’t be extremely informative.
Another really big thing that happened this year
from a policy perspective was the Bitcoin
and Ethereum exchange traded products were approved.
And I’m deliberately calling them exchange traded products,
ETPs and not ETFs because ETFs,
while they are a form of ETP,
the underlying portfolios of them would have securities,
whereas in this case, these crypto ETPs were registered
with the SEC in a way that indicates
the underlying portfolios are not securities.
Anyway, that’s a really important point,
but it is the first time we’ve ever had
these market products accessible on major stock markets.
It’s kind of a big deal.
– I think it’s a very big deal.
I think it legitimizes crypto as an asset class.
I think it puts us on a path to really having crypto
be a part of every diversified portfolio,
then just makes it much more accessible,
which I think is a good thing.
In the report, we do look at these kind of net inflow numbers
because crypto is all on chain.
We can see when the ETFs are accumulating
and distributing crypto out of these products.
They haven’t been all that high relative to expectations,
maybe it has underwhelmed a bit.
But I have talked to some experts
and they do say that getting the distributors activated
is just something that’s gonna take time.
You need to go through a long process.
You need to get it into the model portfolios.
You need to discuss it with your clients.
And I think that could be a multi-year process.
And so I’d keep an eye on those inflow numbers
over the next few years because now that we have them,
I think a tremendous tailwind for the industry.
– Yeah, I think it absolutely does broaden access
to a whole new segment of investors
that otherwise would not have dabbled with crypto beforehand.
I’m thinking about my dad for one.
He’s like, where’s the ETF?
Where’s the ETP as it were?
‘Cause he’s probably not gonna set up a hardware wallet.
All right, okay, anyway.
So let’s dig into some of the other things
we found in this report.
People always ask this question,
where are the crypto applications?
But there’s one that’s kind of been staring people
in the face for a long time.
And that is stablecoins.
Stablecoins are a product that people are using a lot.
It’s a crypto product.
I think people discount that.
– Well, stablecoins have been in crypto for a long time.
In the earlier days, people used to think of them
as something that would end up being for payments.
And very interestingly, what we found in 2021, 2022,
as the stablecoin supplies really started to pop off
was that they were primarily being used
as a means of settlement between centralized exchanges
and also as collateral for DeFi protocols.
Something people could supply and lend in a protocol
and then enable other people to borrow
and create debts denominated in dollars,
which is a lot easier to reason about
than a debt denominated in Ethereum
or some other volatile asset.
Another reason why stablecoins
make a lot of sense as collateral
is that if you’re borrowing a fair amount on chain,
it may be totally reasonable to pay a 30, 50
or even $100 transaction fee to perform that borrow
because it still may be meaningfully more affordable
than other ways to engage in an over-collateralized loan.
And that is really the type of use case that we saw
for people in the 2021 through 2023 period for stablecoins.
But as a result of the infrastructural improvements
in 2024, where lots has come online, not just 4844,
but the proliferation of L2s in Ethereum world generally.
– 4844 being the Denkun upgrade
that Ethereum went through in March of this year,
also called Proto-Dank sharding.
– Yeah, so as a result of those infrastructural improvements
as well as increasing adoption
in newer generation, newer architecture,
blockchains like Solana, Sui, many others,
now sending stablecoins in a single transaction
often costs a penny or less.
So because of this, so just this year
because of these improvements,
I think a lot of people are talking about stablecoins
as a medium for payment again.
It’s really interesting to me because
I can’t emphasize enough how in 2022,
this was just a non-start.
Everyone had given up on it.
I don’t think I heard the word payment in 2022
except to debunk the possibility
that stablecoins were being used for payments.
Whereas now it’s something that I’m hearing about
all the time and it’s not just in a conventional,
pay for your coffee with crypto setting,
although that is actually a real possibility coinbase
had to pay for a coffee with USD seed day in New York,
not long ago, it was a lot of fun.
But more concretely, now people can play with blockchains
as a piece of infrastructure to potentially bring down
interchange fees and merchant network fees,
all the types of fees that go into settling
an actual consumer payment or something.
I just pre-ordered a book from Stripe Press
with the new Stripe pay with crypto feature.
USTC on Solana was fantastic.
It was just a really straightforward experience for me.
Of course, I already have crypto on my wallet,
so that made it pretty convenient,
but these are real things.
– Right, this is because you’ve got to still onboard
to like a layer two network, say, an L2, a rollup,
where the fees would be lower.
But once you’re there, it becomes quite seamless
to transact and move around.
– Yeah, and there’s still very meaningful UX challenges.
But the point is to say is like now this is in the story
and there’s a lot of crypto projects
that are interested in trying to improve payments
or aspects of payments or take advantage
of the ease of settling payments internationally,
computationally, there’s all kinds of ways
that payments really ought to be programmed
and experimented with.
And now just this year, that’s a possibility.
So just to set people’s expectations
like the way I like to think about it is
now that there is a glut of supply
for being able to transact stablecoin,
dollar denominated payments.
How long will it take for builders
to consume that extra supply
in terms of interesting applications?
It’s not instant.
People don’t realize this.
People kind of like see new technology.
It sort of appears.
But from my perspective, it takes at a minimum six months
to start to see people really talk about it.
And then it takes about two years
for people to soak up all of the excess.
This reminds me a lot of the mid-wit meme
where it’s like maybe it is as simple as just,
when the fees come down, stablecoins work well.
When the fees are really high, stablecoins kind of suck.
And so I think to all of the points that Eddie made in 2024,
we made a ton of infrastructure improvements.
It brought fees down just to share some data
from our report on this.
In 2021, to send USDC on Ethereum
using the average gas price, it was about $12.
And that’s a lot of money.
That was like my lunch that I just had today.
– Yeah, and as people took for granted,
that’s obviously totally unacceptable for a payment setting.
Unless you’re moving like tens of thousands of dollars,
then it actually may be better.
But there’s a smaller number of people
who are in that situation.
– Definitely.
Today, if you use USDC on Ethereum post EIP4844,
it’s like $1.
But if you use USDC on base, which is a layer two,
it’s less than a cent, right?
And so that makes all the difference
when it comes to stablecoin adoption.
And it’s no coincidence that 2024 was the year
that stablecoins found product market fit.
And I think because it’s as simple as just
the infrastructure got better,
these came down and now it works.
– It’s really amazing to wrap your head around this
that just a few years ago, it cost $12 to transact.
– Exactly, it totally changes the applications
that are possible.
And I think there’s a number of examples
that we can point to that are only now possible
in a low fee environment.
And we do our best to highlight
those emerging applications in the report.
– This doesn’t just speak to stablecoins.
It also speaks to other sorts of applications
that weren’t possible before.
I mean, I would say the most striking thing to me
in this report compared to past reports was,
look, NFTs were going crazy a few years ago.
The secondary markets, NFTs were trading on them
for billions of dollars regularly.
That activity has subsided.
But now because fees have come down,
we’re seeing totally different sorts of consumer behaviors
arise around NFTs.
I think a lot of people might think that NFTs happened
and then they went away and they’re over and done.
And your sort of mainstream listener here
might not realize that they’ve actually stuck around
and they’re just game traction
in a completely different context.
– Being honest, the NFT market has faced
some pretty tremendous challenges.
There was a lot of speculative activity in prior years.
Very high trading volume, high priced premium collections.
We definitely got over our skis a bit as an industry.
As a result, we’ve seen a 90 plus percent decrease
in trading volume over the last few years.
There’s been a ton of drama around
how creators can enforce royalties.
And so we have faced a lot of challenges.
And I think there are some data points that you can look at
that say, wow, the NFT market really is not what it once was.
And I think that is very true in all senses.
But I think what’s also happened at the same time
is to the point we were just discussing
about the infrastructure getting better.
These infrastructure improvements enabled NFTs
to be exchanged and traded and interacted with
at much lower costs, which really kind of shifted
the behavior away from these high volume,
high price speculative secondary markets
into these newer low cost social collecting experiences.
For example, if you look at the number of NFT collections
with 50 plus unique mentors, the trend is actually very positive.
It means that people are still interacting
and using these NFTs and collecting these NFTs,
but they’re doing it much different than they had in prior years.
And this is only possible in a low fee environment.
You can look at products like Zora today.
You can look at products like Rodeo today.
And there are some really fascinating,
cool, new emerging cultural behaviors
around this social collecting
that I think many people would find really interesting.
And so I would say the NFT market is very much alive,
but I think behavior has shifted.
And I think it’s all driven by the infrastructure developments
in 2024.
Yeah, I don’t know that there’s a perfect way
to communicate what this new behavior is
other than people like to collect stuff.
And on a social network,
you’re probably familiar with liking hosts.
And I’ve heard people describe this new sort
of social collecting experience
as a kind of super like behavior
where you are just expressing
that you’re interested in something.
And critically, it’s on the order of magnitude
of like one to two cents per collecting.
In prior years, we were paying tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of dollars,
which of course, only very few people can afford.
But now we’re opening it up to a much broader audience,
which I think is a net positive for the NFT market.
We got to recall that the way crypto has developed
is the first thing that you can do.
And actually the simplest thing to do computationally
is just to buy and own the thing.
That is the novel component,
is being able to directly own the underlying asset
on this big shared-state computer.
Doing more complicated things like transacting
or mutating the state of a program,
these require much more computational capacity
in addition to creativity from application designers,
in addition to user experience improvements
to make it easier to do those things.
We’re seeing advances on all of those fronts.
And so you should expect the complexity
of what people do with blockchains to increase over time,
starting from the simplest, which is just owning
and moving to the more complex things,
interacting with programs.
– Even just the mentorship that it takes
to understand what is activity on a blockchain,
it’s affected by this evolution,
where it’s not just a money payment system,
it’s actually a shared-state computer, as you called it, Eddie.
And these interactions can be interactions with applications,
just like people are interacting
with websites or something.
All these interactions can be much more expansive
than this sort of limited view of crypto,
just as like a money thing.
– Yeah, and I want to sketch out,
there’s a pattern to how these things unfold, right?
Just buying an NFT when the costs are very high.
That’s the simplest thing you can do,
that’s the best supported thing you can do,
and that’s probably the only thing
that’s reasonable to afford.
But NFTs are programmable.
Experimenting with what that looks like requires low gas fees.
So what I expect, like the exact pattern I would expect,
would be speculative boom with very simple uses
where most of the interesting things that happen
in the very, very earliest stages
are actually the themes and the ideas that come through,
as people sort of imagine what’s possible.
You see glimmers of very exciting things.
Of course, then they run into the pragmatic reality
that it’s too expensive, it’s developing too slow,
there are certain pragmatic limits.
As those things scale, then experimentation returns,
and then as experimentation develops,
more complex and interesting applications
start to take place.
We just described that with stablecoins.
The exact same thing is gonna happen with NFTs
and with all these different settings.
It’s not a crypto specific thing.
I think that’s how AI is developing as well.
– Because you mentioned AI,
I think people listening will recognize
that AI is one of the biggest trends of the past year.
But what’s interesting is that it’s not just a trend within tech,
it’s also a trend within crypto.
Maybe it’s unsurprising that crypto influencers
are talking about AI.
But what is more surprising is that the people
likely as to visit the websites of various AI tools
like chatGPT are also the likeliest to visit
some of the top crypto websites out there.
And that goes to this sort of inference
that could possibly be drawn that there is strong overlap
between the user bases of these kind of frontier technologies.
– Yeah, I mean, definitely it’s a hot area.
And AI was clearly the breakaway narrative in 2024,
even among crypto social circles relative to other topics.
And so clearly people are thinking about this.
And a lot of the top crypto sites
are highly, highly overlapping with chatGPT.com,
which indicates that there may be an overlap
in crypto and AI users.
And the fact that there is, I do think reinforces this point
that it’s a hot area.
And I think we should expect to see more innovation
in this pocket of crypto specifically.
– So let’s cover some more emerging applications.
The cost of transacting on blockchain networks
is coming down, like we said.
It can cost as little as cents on the dollar now,
or even less than a cent.
Just a tremendous plummeting of costs there.
What other territory does this open up?
– Yeah, some areas that have popped up include Deepin.
There are new forming marketplaces for energy,
for wireless bandwidth, for mapping,
for weather, for food delivery.
– This is decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
So it’s where the digital world meets the physical world,
like using a digital overlay to manage resources
in the physical world.
– Yeah, and the difference, of course,
we have these things like with Uber and Lyft and so on.
You could call those like Web 2 Deepin networks.
The key difference is that in a blockchain,
there’s a degree of credible neutrality
about the underlying platform.
That means that people who build on top of it,
including not just the suppliers of the good,
and not just the people buying it,
but also people who build applications
to make the whole thing work better,
can take for granted what they’re building on,
and not risk being rent collected
or sure locked by the underlying platform.
And if you can make payments affordably,
if you can update reputation systems,
incorporate all kinds of interesting identity systems,
all these things that these marketplaces need,
then they can finally exist.
So those have been emerging.
Maybe a final category, which we give a little glimpse of
in the report is Decentralized Social Networks,
Farkaster, which is another portfolio company of ours.
It’s an incredible place for builders to experiment
with different types of tools, different types of toys,
to extend and improve the experience
for all types of users.
And I know for a fact,
just having spent a bunch of time with the Farkaster team,
that they are totally capacity limited.
They’re working really hard to allow the network
to post more and more people while remaining
totally decentralized.
And you can see in their report,
a lot of projects where people have been experimenting
with software on top of this network.
– Even in our Builder Energy dashboard,
we’re seeing that a lot of builders
are interested in social networks.
I think 10% of the founders that we’ve talked to
and looked at are building social related projects.
So I think people see this opportunity
and they expect that it’s gonna be a thing,
given how big it was in web two.
– Yeah, then there’s prediction markets,
of course those have been huge this year.
No surprise, given the incredible dynamics
and volatility related to the election.
– Yeah, prediction markets is an idea
that people have been talking about for decades,
but have been hamstrung.
And people are actually coming around to their value
in ability to source up knowledge
from disparate parts of the world
and kind of get a better, more informed picture
of the state of the world and how things might shake out.
It’s interesting to see that it’s actually finally
getting some traction when it’s a very old idea
that has been stalled for so long.
All right, Eddie, we’ve been putting out reports
for three years, what’s been most surprising looking
at this year’s report compared to earlier reports?
– I don’t know, stepping back, I’d say,
when we’re deep in the mix, like we are,
it often feels like nothing is coming fast enough.
I feel that all the time.
I want it right now, I want it right now, I’m sick of waiting.
And there are some areas that have definitely lagged,
but at the same time, it is a little bit unbelievable
when you look back at the progress.
Let’s be very conservative in our estimates.
And let’s say we have 30 million monthly active users
of blockchains, that’s pretty damn good.
Like I’m pretty happy with where that is,
given the historical infrastructural limits.
Like about a year ago, we were all debating
how long it would take things to start to heat up
in terms of on-chain usage.
And where I ended up was that six months after Dencun,
six months after 4844, is when we’d start to see
like new types of stories,
because that’s about how long it takes.
And we’re just like six months after.
And I think that that’s exactly what’s happening.
Like I think the payments thing is one of those things.
And I think some of these new networks,
some of these like deep in networks are examples of that.
– So it feels very on track to me,
and I’m very pleased with that.
That’s kind of surprising, maybe in a certain way.
That is surprising to me that it feels very
kinda like we are thinking it’s going to unfold.
– If you had to cast your prediction a year ahead,
what do you think is gonna be the theme
of State of Crypto 2025?
– I hope that all the extra block spaces filled
with something, something productive.
That’s what I hope it’s about.
It’s about what fills that block space.
We just started creating all these L2s and new blockchains.
And maybe something that we didn’t put in the report
’cause it can be challenging to present
in a very straightforward way.
But bridges are great for people in crypto.
You know that three years ago,
there were very few bridges and they were terrible
and they were slow and they were expensive
and they were error prone.
There’s just a lot wrong with them.
Now bridges, there’s myriad options,
really high quality, fast, super affordable,
great connectivity.
That’s like no question.
Anyone in crypto would agree with that.
Well, now that we have good bridges
and now that we’ve got L2s,
we’re getting tons more L2s and tons more bridges
and tons more interoperability questions and fragmentation.
So as always happens with technology,
you solve one problem, you create another.
I’m beginning to see signs
that there are really, really great strategies
to solve interoperability.
And so I hope the combination of good interoperability
plus good block space means finally great user experience
for a family of applications.
If that was the case at the end of 2025,
I’d be really pleased.
– That’s great for the wish list.
I really hope that in the coming years,
our section on infrastructure gets smaller
and our section on applications gets bigger.
I think there’s still a place to report
on key infrastructure developments,
which I think will continue to happen
over the coming years,
but I think it should be hopefully more about
how do we just overall improve the user experience?
There’s count abstraction protocols, interoperability,
various developments that we can report on.
But I hope that that is not the main story.
I hope the main story of 2025 and the year’s following
is that we now have a new set of applications
that are proving to be real use cases for this technology
that is attracting people.
And so that is my hope for the years to come.
We’ve made a lot of progress on infrastructure,
but hopefully from here going forward,
the improvements are more on the margin.
– Maybe in the years ahead,
there won’t even be a need for a state of crypto report.
We will all just be using these applications
and won’t even know that there’s crypto on the backend.
– Could be.
– We’ll have to wait to know for sure.
Thank you both for joining.
– Thank you, Robert.
– Thank you, Robert.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
you
We take you behind the scenes of our newly released, annual State of Crypto Report — a16z crypto’s analysis of the latest data and trends that have defined the industry in 2024.
This year’s report features some brand new insights, from estimating the number of real crypto users globally, to understanding how much interest in crypto swing states may have ahead of the U.S. election. We also dig into infrastructure improvements to blockchains and key applications — including stablecoins, AI, and so-called DePIN. Be sure to visit a16zcrypto.com for all this and more including a new “Builder Energy” dashboard, which we’ll discuss on the show.
Joining me to talk about the findings are lead data scientist and report author Daren Matsuoka and CTO Eddy Lazzarin. The first voice you’ll hear after mine is Daren’s, then Eddy’s.
a16z crypto resources:
-Estimating the number of real crypto users
by Daren Matsuoka and Eddy Lazzarin
Stay Updated:
Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z
Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z
Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
