(SeaPRwire) – By: Lucas Caldwell
Here is the dirty secret of crypto adoption metrics: the industry cannot count its own users within a margin of 180 million people. Depending on which tracker you trust, somewhere between 560 million and 741 million humans hold cryptocurrency. That is a spread larger than the entire population of Russia. Any other asset class would be laughed out of the room for tolerating this kind of statistical fog. In crypto, we call it Tuesday. The uncomfortable truth is that the “how many people own crypto” question is less a measurement problem and more a mirror of how immature the industry’s data infrastructure still is.
Strip away the spin and the raw numbers look like this. Triple-A counted 562 million owners in 2024, roughly 6.9% of the world. Crypto.com put 2024 at 659 million and 2025 at 741 million, about 9% globally. A 2026 Paybis report lands at 559 million, suspiciously close to Triple-A. Oobit echoes 562 million with a 6.8% rate. The growth trajectory is real though. Triple-A had roughly 420 million owners in 2023, a 5.3% share. Crypto.com shows 12.4% growth from 2024 to 2025. Longer term, Triple-A claims a 99% compound annual growth rate from 2018 to 2023, versus about 8% for traditional payments.
The divergence is methodological, not accidental. Triple-A leans on national surveys and banking data. Crypto.com blends blockchain data with exchange and survey inputs, which inflates its count by roughly 100 million. Then there is the wallet problem, which nobody wants to discuss honestly. One person routinely holds several wallets across chains and exchanges. Meanwhile a single custodial exchange address can represent millions of customers whose coins never touch the blockchain. On-chain data overcounts whales and undercounts exchange users simultaneously. Surveys overcount the curious and undercount the discreet. Every methodology is wrong in its own special way.
Paybis adds another wrinkle by measuring against internet users rather than total population. By that yardstick, 9.9% of internet users hold crypto, roughly one in ten. Same trend, three headlines: 7%, 9%, or 10%, depending on who is selling the report. This is not a trivial distinction. Denominator choice is where advocacy hides. A project pitching investors cites the internet-user figure. A regulator downplaying systemic risk cites the global population figure. The underlying reality, probably somewhere between 600 and 700 million owners, gets buried under framing. And the number that should sober everyone up is this: more than 85% of the world still owns nothing.
Geography tells the more interesting story. The UAE leads ownership rates at 25.3%, with Singapore at 24.4%, Turkey at 19.3%, and Argentina at 18.9%. That list fuses two completely different economies: wealthy trading hubs with friendly rules, and inflation-battered nations where crypto is a savings escape hatch. India tops the Chainalysis activity index, a different metric entirely. Regional growth is wildly uneven. Oobit reports South America surged 116.5% in one year, from 25.5 million to 55.2 million users. North America grew 38.6% to 72.2 million. Paybis credits US spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs plus Europe’s MiCA framework for recent gains.
The day this industry can count its users to two significant figures is the day it has finally grown up.