Not long ago, the HelloBTC issued a statement saying that 2% of the world’s people really understand the blockchain. According to the total population of 7 billion in the world, is there really 140 million people get involved in cryptocurrency and blockchain?

Now, we’d like to roughly estimate how many cryptocurrency participants in the blockchain industry based on the data analysis.

 

Number of Bitcoin Unique Address

To estimate the number of users in the blockchain industry, many people think of the quantity of currency address for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency. Anyone who enters the cryptocurrency circle is usually attracted by Bitcoin first. And Ethereum has a wider range of applications. Tokens in many projects are issued based on the smart contract of Ethereum.

Therefore, the number of Bitcoin and Ethereum unique address should be the best explanation.

Most of the Bitcoin addresses do not have any coins (because they are not enabled yet), so only the coin unique address is regarded as the valid one. However, anyone can create countless bitcoin addresses, which is a flaw in estimating the number of bitcoin unique address.

The number of Bitcoin unique address can be viewed through the Bitcoin Blockchain Browser.

According to the data at bitinfocharts.com above, we can easily figure out that the number of Bitcoin unique address is about 27.83 million.

Considering that many bitcoin whales don’t put all their eggs in the same basket, they may have multiple accounts. Moreover, many people store the bitcoins on the trading platform instead of their own bitcoin wallets, the actual number may be less than 2,783.

 

Number of Ethereum Unique Address

The address of Ethereum can be viewed at etherscan.com.

As of October 20, the number of Ethereum address was approximately 78.1 million, and the daily added address was approximately 66,000. According to such a growth rate, it will take about one year for the total number of Ethereum address to reach 100 million.

Because it’s very easy to create Ethereum address without any extra spending, many people have created a number of Ethereum address for sake of airdrop or “candy”. Some investors have even used program to create thousands of addresses.

So, one thing is certain, the number of Ethereum address is more than the number of real users.

 

Other Estimation Methods

In addition to estimating by the number of addresses, we can also estimate by the number of users on trading platform.

Due to the high cognitive threshold in blockchain, many people are not very familiar with the operation of wallet, so most of the operations are carried out on a centralized trading platform. Therefore, the number of users on trading platform can serve as the basis for estimating the number of cryptocurrency participants.

However, since the specific real data is a trade secret, the trading platforms usually announce the order of magnitude. For example, Binance has already claimed over 10 million registered users. Not long ago, when responding to a user’s question, the OKEx CEO mentioned that there were tens of millions of users on the platform.

 

Summary

In summary, the number of cryptocurrency user is more than the 27.83 million BTC unique addresses and less than the 78.1 million ETH unique addresses. If, according to the assumption that 30% of all users do not hold BTC and 80% own two ETH addresses, the estimated number of users will be more than 40 million.

In 2018, Yuan Yuming, dean of the Huobi Blockchain Research Institute, said: “According to my statistics and judgment, the total number of users in the global blockchain is 20 million or less. China has a high probability of one million users. Such a size of users is very small.”

Considering the changes in time, the estimated number of over 40 million users is reasonable, which is also on the same order of magnitude with the number “20 million” estimated by Yuan Yuming.