{"id":6161,"date":"2020-08-24T13:37:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T17:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/?p=6161"},"modified":"2020-09-03T11:07:30","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T15:07:30","slug":"crypto-mass-adoption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/2020\/08\/24\/crypto-mass-adoption","title":{"rendered":"Crypto mass adoption will be here when… [fill in the blank]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some attention has been devoted in recent years to the matter of blockchain adoption<\/strong> \u2014 more specifically, when will blockchain technology go mainstream \u2014 and when it does, how will we even know? The question is somewhat problematic because blockchain is an infrastructure, operating in the background \u2014 out of sight \u2014 that runs across multiple industries and domains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In an effort to shed some light on this point at issue, Cointegraph Magazine informally surveyed industry thought leaders to complete this sentence, \u201cWe will know blockchain has gone mainstream when _______.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Peshkam, executive in residence at European business school INSEAD, told Cointelegraph Magazine that there were over <\/span>50 million Blockchain<\/span><\/a> wallet users at the end of June 2020. \u201cTraditionally this is the number of users [needed] to accept that a technology has gone mainstream.<\/span>\u201d It took <\/span>the automobile 62 years<\/span><\/a> to reach the \u201cmagic\u201d 50-million-user mark, the telephone 50 years, electricity 46 years, and the internet seven years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We are in a networked world today, of course, where a technology can spread at an exponential rate \u2014 and the world also has many more consumers than in Henry Ford\u2019s time \u2014 so it isn\u2019t really fair to compare discrete items like automobiles or telephones to encrypted, distributed digital ledgers. For his part, Peshkam accepts the 50-million-user threshold as a necessary metric, but not a sufficient one. As he explained:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn my view this number, while a useful indicator, is not sufficient to declare Blockchain is in the mainstream.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe missing piece before mass adoption of Blockchain can happen is a simple app with clear value proposition.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Are numbers even useful?<\/h4>\n

In fact, none of the cognoscenti to whom Cointelegraph posed this question answered with a numeric threshold <\/span>alone<\/span><\/i>. Garrick Hileman, head of research at Blockchain.com, provided a one line answer: Mass adoption has arrived when <\/span>\u201ccrypto is the financial system for the Internet.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to a Blockchain.com <\/span>blog <\/span><\/a>that expands on this point, the circumstance might look (schematically) something like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Blockchain<\/p>\n

(Blockchain.com)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But it still begs our question, because how will we actually know<\/strong> when crypto becomes the financial system for the internet? The blog <\/span>describes Blockchain.com\u2019s <\/span>goal of reaching <\/span>1 billion <\/span><\/i>on-chain crypto wallets by 2030. Presumably, that would indicate mainstream acceptance \u2014 but for <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>to happen, the company concedes, crypto will need to be easier to use, more transaction friendly, and less costly (i.e., lower fees).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Do traditional metrics apply?<\/h4>\n

Michel Rauchs, the head of Paradigma \u2014 a consulting firm focusing on the digital assets sector \u2014 as well as a research affiliate and former lead for the cryptocurrency and blockchain research program at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge, told Cointelegraph that traditional metrics for software are only of limited utility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor instance, the number of developers or total software downloads doesn\u2019t provide information about the actual impact of the technology. It\u2019s a bit like trying to assess the value of COBOL by merely looking at the number of active developers: it\u2019s still the predominant programming language underpinning much of core banking systems that process trillions of dollars in value, yet there is an acute shortage of developers on the market that are familiar with the decade-old language.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That said, some additional metrics that might further inform the question asked, in Rauchs\u2019 view were:<\/span><\/p>\n