(Dutch version)

Earlier research showed that cryptocurrencies ranked in importance with Marketcap as the criterion, produce a list that has little or no use and actually only says something about the marketing effort and how much the circulating supply is manipulated of the relevant coin. The most frequently asked question in response to the aforementioned research was: Is there another, better way, to present the importance of a Crypto-coin?

Other methods

Yes, there are. But in-depth research into the coins is needed and also it has the disadvantage that they are always interpretations of the researcher and his method. For example, the author has previously conducted a study into which crypto has the best chances of becoming a new payment system. And later an attempt was made to classify coins. Both attempts are appreciated by many people but there are also critics who wonder why one aspect is considered more important than the other.

In addition, such extensive research is of course not easy to carry out.

In both of the above studies, nothing has been done with the number of users of a crypto currency. While the number of users does say something about the appreciation the public has for a coin and how the characteristics apparently appeal to a certain group of people. After all, a coin without users is not a coin.

That is why a small study is presented here into the number of users of Crypto coins. But keep in mind that the coin with the largest number of users does not necessarily have to be the best.

To make an analogy: despite the fact that Volkswagen sells the most cars worldwide, you cannot say that Volkswagen produces the best cars. But it is the car brand that apparently attracts the largest number of people who judge the Volkswagen brand as good on points such as reliability, price / quality, safety, etc. The same goes for crypto coins of course.

Determine the number of users.

Finding out the number of users of a cryptographic currency is not easy either. No single coin has that number listed anywhere on their website and that is also difficult because Crypto is decentralized. There is no body that keeps track of how many users a coin has. Yet there is something to say about it.

Users is actually a wrong word because users means that people “use” the product. But in the crypto world this is practically not the case. At most, they buy and sell the coins and possibly hold them, the so-called “Hodlen”. But use is seldom the case. Who ever has bought or paid something with Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dash?

Crypto owner would be a better name but we continue to use the word “Users” in the rest of the story.

Allmost all blockchains of the crypto coins are public and we can count the number of addresses in them. The number of used addresses with content can be a measure for the number of users. We will test this with my favorite coin Gulden (NLG) because I have access to the data there.

Control

Through the block explorer of Gulden Dactual we can find out that 2.1 million unique addresses have now been used, of which over 131,000 Gulden addresses now have a content >0. From this count we can deduce that there are a maximum of 131,000 users, because there cannot be more users than the number of addresses with content. But probably there are fewer users because a number of users will have multiple addresses. The modern wallets create new addresses every time a transaction takes place, but also empty other addresses. In general, you can say that those who do a lot of transactions will soon have ten-twenty addresses with some coins in it. But the vast majority of users only own one or two addresses. If we look at the distribution, we see that the largest number of addresses (about 70%) have between 10–10,000 Gulden. These are users who once have bought some coins in the hope that they will become rich but don’t do anything with the wallet and are now waiting for better times.

Downloads

We also know from the download data that there were over 175,000 unique downloads of the Gulden Wallet software. The number of downloads exceeds the maximum number of users. But that is not surprising, probably there are many users who have a mobile wallet and a desktop wallet running. Many people also download but decide not to invest anything. We also know that about 30% of the downloads come from abroad and 70% from the Netherlands.

Research

A survey by Kantar TNS (only Dutch) among 35,040 consumers revealed that in August-September 2018 +/- 100,000 Dutch households owned Gulden. This number does not include foreign users because the survey only covered the Dutch territory.

Taking all the data into account, we can say that the current number of Gulden users is about 100,000 and that corresponds to the number of Gulden addresses 100,000 : 131,000. We can say that the number of users is therefore +/-75% of the number of Gulden addresses with content.

Ranking

With this knowledge we checked with each crypto coin if there is a block explorer available which gave the number of addresses used in the form of a distribution overview or even a richlist or the like. And if so, the number of addresses is multiplied by 0.75 in order to filter out the multiple-address accounts and exchange addresses and to arrive at the number of users.

For tokens on the Ethereum blockchain the number of holders is neatly indicated in Etherscan.io. This number is multiplied by 0.98 to filter out the addresses of exchanges etc.

Unfortunately not all explorers were able to find the number of users, so not all Coins could be assessed. But those that were available did give a remarkable picture.

That Bitcoin would be the largest would probably not surprise anyone but that for example Lisk (LSK) with a Marketcap of $112,000,000 has only 24,000 users, or NEM with a Marketcap of half a billion dollars also no more than 112,000 users surprises the writer.

There are also really small coins to be found. Take USD coin, a marketcap of 188 million dollars on CMC 27, but with only 3206 users. Dex (DEX)crowned with only 286 users of which the top 10 addresses also hold 91.6% of the number of Tokens. But just on Place 77 in Coinmarketcap with a Marketcap of 36 million dollars. In other words, fried air!

Also nice to see is that “smaller” coins like Vertcoin (VTC) and Gulden (NLG) with a CMC ranking around 200 in this list with their 100,000 users score quite well.