a16z: The global number of crypto users reached a maximum of 617 million in September

What’s new? The cryptocurrency division of the leading venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) says that activity in the digital asset sector has reached a record high this year. Analysts estimate that by September, there were around 617 million cryptocurrency users worldwide and up to 60 million monthly active users.

a16z report

What else is known? The report also said that the number of active addresses exceeded 220 million in 2024. The surge in activity is primarily attributed to the Solana blockchain, which accounts for about 100 million active addresses.

It is followed by NEAR with 31 million active addresses, the Ethereum-based Layer 2 (L2) Base network from crypto exchange Coinbase (22 million), TRON (14 million), and Bitcoin (11 million).

Among networks with support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the second most active after Base was the BNB network from crypto exchange Binance (10 million). The indicator of the main Ethereum blockchain is 6 million active addresses.

Solana also turned out to be the leader in terms of the growth of developers’ interests. The share of companies interested in launching projects on Solana grew from 5,1% in 2023 to 11,2% in 2024. Base (from 7,8% to 10,7%) and Bitcoin (from 2,6% to 4,2%) also showed the most notable growth.

In absolute terms, Ethereum remains the leader with the share of interested developers at 20,8%. It is followed by Solana and Base, and then Polygon (7,9%), Optimism (6,7%), Arbitrum (6,2%), Avalanche (4,2%), and Bitcoin (4,2%).

This year also saw the highest number of mobile wallet users — 29 million. Although the US is the leader in the share of monthly mobile wallet users (12%), the overall national figure is declining due to regulatory activity. Thus, projects often stop serving US customers due to fear of legal repercussions.

In terms of stablecoins, more than 99% of such assets are currently denominated in US dollars, with only 0,2% denominated in euros. In Q2, there were 1,1 billion transactions involving $8,5 trillion in stablecoins. In comparison, payment company Visa’s figure was only $3,9 trillion.

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Stablecoins account for 32% of daily cryptocurrency usage, second only to the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector with a 34% share when measured by daily active addresses. The rest of the activity is spread across infrastructure projects (bridges, oracles, MEV bots, account abstraction, etc.), token transfer operations, gaming, NFTs, and social networks.

The impact of the Dencun upgrade, which was rolled out to the Ethereum mainnet in March, is noted separately. Thus, thanks to it, the volume of ETH in L2 networks increased by 36%, and commissions in them in comparison with the basic blockchain fell by 94%.

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“We appear to be at an inflection point for crypto infrastructure, which has rapidly advanced the scaling of blockchains and will unlock new possibilities for applications and user activity,” notes a16z blockchain analyst Daren Matsuoka.

The paper emphasizes that a sharp decline in transaction fees has contributed to the wider adoption of stablecoins.

The company also noted a shift in trends in the NFT sector: activity declined in secondary speculative markets with high asset values but increased in the segment of low-cost collections on marketplaces like Zora and Rodeo, which function as social networks.

As for blockchain social networks, they account for only a small portion of daily activity, but they are attracting developers: in 2024, 10,3% of crypto projects were related to this area. Social network projects like Farcaster are among the top 5 most popular subcategories for developers this year.