Crypto Adoption is Like Internet in 1990s With 50M+ Users, Massive Potential Left

Blockchain Space Still Embryonic

Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures and co-founder of Coinmetrics, recently remarked that the number of consumers utilizing public blockchains currently equals that of the Internet in 1997, at 50 to 70 million users. And out of those 60-odd million, likely only a few million are actively involved in Bitcoin’s and crypto’s day-to-day happenings. This statistic, according to Carter, begs the pertinent question: Why did we have such a large bubble in 2017, when the first notable Dotcom bubble occurred at 300 million users?

Carter had three hypotheses to answer this question. Firstly, he noted that the Dotcom Bubble remains fresh in the mind of investors, making the crypto bubble a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” in that consumers ‘FOMOed’ into BTC and its brethren en-masse after they recalled the gains that nascent Internet stocks posted. Secondly, the long-standing industry insider, who previously worked with Fidelity Investments’ crypto division, noted that as cryptocurrencies are “inherently a financial phenomenon,” they are more susceptible to bubble-esque behavior

And lastly, and most logical in the eyes of crypto’s crusaders, the reason why cryptocurrencies may have exploded as early as they did is that 2017’s bubble was “smaller than people think.” Carter explains that if you really boil the actual metrics down, the cryptocurrency space’s actual market capitalization was less than the $840 billion seen on data aggregators like CoinMarketCap. He looks to the fact that if you summate all mining revenue for Proof of Work (PoW), only $15 billion actually flowed into the space, making the rest of the value somewhat inflated.

With the Coinmetrics co-founder’s last point in mind, another question can be posed: if crypto’s latest bubble was small on the scale of traditional markets, does parabolic upside remain?

Copyright: https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/04/25/crypto-adoption-is-like-internet-in-1990s-with-50m-users-massive-potential-left/