5 million unique users in March
A Cambridge study conducted by Dr. Garrick Hileman and Michel Rauchs in March 2017 found that the number of active users of bitcoin portfolios was in the order of 2.9 million and 5.8 million.
However, since then, in proportion to the market valuation and the price of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency user base has grown rapidly. Coinbase alone, the world's largest Bitcoin brokerage and trading platform, serves more than 13 million active users. In November alone, Coinbase registered 1.2 million users.
Coinbase user growth table provided by Alistair Milne, investor and partner of Bitcoin at Altana Digital Currency Fund
The main regional bitcoin exchanges, such as Bitmaper in Japan and Bithumb in South Korea, also account for nearly one million users on each platform.
If hot portfolios or bitcoin addresses on bitcoin exchanges are included, the number of unique Bitcoin users is probably greater than 10 million.
Determinants of the widespread adoption of bitcoin
Essentially, with 200 million active users, bitcoin will penetrate the mainstream market, and the vast majority of casual investors and consumers will adopt bitcoin as a store of value and a digital currency.
The listing of CBOE and CME bitcoin futures in mid-December will favor the adoption of bitcoin in the traditional financial market, among large institutional investors, retailers, hedge funds and banks. investment companies. As tens of billions of institutional money enter the bitcoin market, occasional consumers and investors will follow, creating a domino effect.
Next, more financial institutions, financial service providers and fintech platforms will begin to provide services around bitcoin, thus improving the ease of use and liquidity of bitcoin . Already, in November, the application fintech massively popular and widely used Square Bitcoin integrated, allowing users to store, buy or sell bitcoin.
Shinhan, the second largest commercial bank in South Korea and an influential financial institution in the local financial industry, began the testing phase of its bitcoin safe services, .
"Shinhan tests a virtual bitcoin vault platform in which the private keys of bitcoin addresses and portfolios are managed and issued by the bank." The bank intends to provide the service. safe deposit box and charge a fee for withdrawals, "said a Shinhan representative.
Finally, as bitcoin consolidates as the world's leading value store, a growing number of unique and active users will begin to use cryptocurrency as common currency and replace it the fiduciary currencies.
However, for users to adopt bitcoin as an alternative to fiat currencies, the underlying scaling problems of the Bitcoin blockchain network must be solved. With second-tier infrastructure like Lightning, in the long run, bitcoin users and businesses will be able to process micropayments, or transactions with substantially lower fees, to pay for goods and services.
Once bitcoin service providers and exchanges integrate Lightning and other potential second-tier scaling solutions, more users will be able to use Bitcoin to settle small payments and large payments, the first being processed on Lightning. the last on the channel, with higher fees.
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