This post was most recently updated on December 18th, 2018

Bitcoin has suffered an 82% price decline from its ATH in December 2017, while altcoins faced a much bigger decline. The overall cryptocurrency market cap in December 2017 was nearly $835 billion but now at the time of writing the overall crypto coinmarket is around $100 billion.

According to a research led by the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance Despite the large downfall in a long bear market, the cryptocurrency adoption is increasing steadily.

According to the chart above the total number of users increased each year in 2016, there were 45 million users, in 2017 there were 85 million users and in 2018 we have 139 million users.

The research also shows a big increase in verified users in the crypto space.

“The analysis reveals the continued growth in the number of user accounts at service providers throughout 2017 and 2018. It also shows that KYC’ed user growth has dwarfed total user account growth, which means that new users are more likely to get immediately verified. Growth rates were at their highest in 2017, and the number of new user accounts as well as ID-verified users continued to rapidly grow in 2018 as well.”

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The research shows that despite the fact that the cryptocurrency technology is global and decentralized it is still mostly dominated by companies in China, USA, Western Europe, Canada ana India.

The map shows a clear domination of the sector by China and USA.

Another important thing the research shows is that the total energy consumption also increased in November 2018 by 5 times compared to November 2017. However, with the massive price drop in the last month and the difficulty adjustment energy consumption decreased compared to a month ago.



“Energy consumption is a direct function of hashpower. Unless new, more energy-efficient mining hardware is introduced, total consumption will rise in a linear fashion with hashpower. Skyrocketing market prices in the second quarter of 2017 led to an exponential increase in hashpower, which in return triggered a substantial rise in the amount of energy consumed by mining facilities. Data suggest that hashpower growth is lagging behind market price growth: hashers often cannot immediately increase production when running at full capacity.”

Despite the fact that the crypto market losses have been considerable in 2018, the fundamentals did not change and the crypto space is developing relentlessly with solid roots.

The adoption of cryptocurrencies as shown in the research above is increasing, also institutional investors are entering in the crypto space. Regulators are exploring cryptocurrency to set regulations with the aim to protect investors from scams and manipulations. This whole picture only confirms that cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

Images Source: Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance