Why Crypto Can't (Yet) Onboard a Billion Users

741 million people hold crypto. Five structural barriers explain why that number has stalled short of the billion-user milestone the industry keeps promising.

A few years ago, analysts predicted crypto would hit one billion users by 2025. That didn't happen. According to Crypto.com's 2025 market sizing report, global crypto ownership reached an estimated 741 million. That's impressive growth, up from roughly 420 million in 2023, but it's still short of the billion-user milestone that industry optimists have been projecting since the last bull cycle.

The question is worth examining honestly: what's actually in the way?

The standard answer is "UX." Wallets are confusing, gas fees are weird, bridging between chains feels like assembling furniture without instructions. That's all true. But it's also incomplete. If bad UX were the only problem, the steady improvements in wallet design and onboarding flows over the past few years should have closed the gap faster than they have.

The real picture is more layered. There are at least five distinct barriers standing between crypto and mainstream adoption, and most industry commentary only addresses one or two of them at a time.

Where Crypto Adoption Actually Stands

Before getting into what's broken, it helps to ground the conversation in what the data actually shows.

Chainalysis's 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index ranks India first for the third consecutive year, followed by the United States, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Brazil. The Asia-Pacific region grew fastest, with a 69% year-over-year increase in on-chain value received. Latin America followed at 63%. These aren't niche markets experimenting with novelty. In many of these countries, crypto serves practical functions: remittances, inflation hedging, access to dollar-denominated assets through stablecoins.

TRM Labs reported that stablecoin transaction volume hit a record high in 2025, exceeding $4 trillion between January and July alone, an 83% increase over the same period in 2024. Stablecoins now represent about 30% of all on-chain crypto volume, and that share is climbing.

But these numbers deserve a caveat. Counting "crypto users" is notoriously difficult. Crypto.com uses on-chain deposit addresses and exchange data. Chainalysis combines on-chain transaction volumes with web traffic attribution. Triple-A estimated 562 million owners in 2024 using survey and ownership data. The methodologies differ, and so do the results. A person who bought $20 of Bitcoin on Coinbase in 2021 and never returned is technically a "user" in most of these datasets. Whether that constitutes meaningful adoption is a different question entirely.

The gap between 741 million and one billion isn't just a number. It represents the difference between a technology used primarily by early adopters and motivated participants, and one that the average person uses without thinking about it.

Five Walls Between Crypto and a Billion Users

Wall 1: The UX Tax

This is the most discussed barrier, and it's real. Using crypto today still requires understanding concepts that most financial products hide from their users entirely.

Consider what a first-time user encounters: download a wallet, secure a seed phrase (and understand what happens if you lose it), figure out which network you're on, buy the right token to pay gas fees, approve transactions through prompts that look like they were designed for developers. If the app they want lives on a different chain, they'll need to find a bridge, understand slippage, and hope nothing goes wrong during the transfer.

Each of these steps represents a decision point where a new user can get confused, lose money, or simply give up. One industry estimate suggests that 80% of new crypto users abandon blockchains within 90 days. The problem isn't that people are incapable of learning this. It's that most competing financial products (Venmo, Revolut, Wise) don't ask them to.

Chain abstraction projects are working to make the underlying infrastructure invisible, similar to how the average internet user never thinks about TCP/IP or DNS. This is necessary work. But abstraction alone doesn't solve every problem on this list.

Wall 2: The Trust Deficit

UX gets most of the attention, but trust may be the more stubborn barrier.

The collapse of FTX in late 2022 didn't just wipe out billions in customer funds. It shaped how tens of millions of non-crypto people perceive the industry. When major publications ran stories about a crypto exchange CEO convicted of fraud, the takeaway for most casual observers was simple: this space isn't safe.

That perception is reinforced regularly. Rug pulls in DeFi, phishing attacks that drain wallets, smart contract exploits that cost protocols hundreds of millions. The irreversible nature of blockchain transactions, which is technically a feature, feels like a risk to anyone accustomed to calling their bank for a chargeback.

TRM Labs' 2025 report noted that investment fraud was the primary contributor to illicit volume growth in stablecoins between 2024 and 2025. Even as the vast majority of activity is legitimate (TRM estimates 99% of stablecoin activity is licit), the perception problem lingers because the failures are dramatic and the media coverage is disproportionate.

Building trust isn't a technical problem. It requires track records, transparency, regulatory accountability, and time.

Wall 3: The Retention Cliff

Here's the barrier almost nobody in the industry talks about: most people who try crypto don't stick around.

The "next billion users" conversation is almost always framed as an acquisition problem. How do we get more people to sign up, create wallets, buy their first token? But acquisition without retention is a leaking bucket. If the crypto industry onboards ten million new users next quarter but eight million of them leave within three months, the net gain is two million.

The reasons for churn overlap with the other walls on this list. Confusing UX drives people away. So does a bad first experience: buying a token that immediately drops 40%, getting hit with an unexpected gas fee, or simply not knowing what to do next after the initial purchase.

This last point matters more than it gets credit for. Most new crypto users don't have a clear second step. They buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum because they've heard of it, and then the experience just stalls. There's no guided pathway. No structured progression. The industry has optimised for the moment of entry but largely ignores what happens in the critical days and weeks that follow.

Wall 4: The Fragmented Learning Problem

Crypto has more educational content than almost any other financial topic. YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, podcasts, newsletters, free courses, paid courses. The volume is enormous.

The quality and structure, however, are inconsistent at best. A new user searching "how to use DeFi" might land on a 2021 YouTube tutorial that references protocols no longer in operation, or a Twitter thread that assumes familiarity with concepts like liquidity pools and impermanent loss without ever explaining them.

The result is a learning environment that works well for highly motivated, self-directed learners (the early adopters who already make up crypto's user base) and poorly for everyone else. There's no reliable sequence. No clear progression from foundational concepts to practical application. No quality control.

This is a meaningful adoption barrier because crypto, unlike most consumer technologies, does require some baseline understanding to use safely. You don't need to understand how your bank's settlement system works to deposit a check. But you do need to understand seed phrase security to avoid losing your assets permanently. You do need to understand the difference between a centralized exchange and a self-custody wallet to make informed decisions about where to hold funds.

The industry's abstraction efforts will reduce the amount of knowledge required over time. But right now, and likely for years to come, new users need a reliable way to build competency. Most of what's available is fragmented, outdated, or incentivised to sell them something rather than teach them something.

Wall 5: The Regulation Patchwork

Regulatory clarity is often listed as a prerequisite for mainstream adoption, and the data supports this. US crypto transaction volume grew by approximately 50% between January and July 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to TRM Labs. This coincided with concrete policy movement: the passage of the GENIUS Act (the first comprehensive US stablecoin law), the White House's 180-Day Digital Assets Report, and ongoing progress on the CLARITY Act for market structure.

But the global picture is uneven. While the US and EU (through MiCA) moved toward clearer frameworks, crypto remains formally banned or heavily restricted in countries like Bangladesh, Algeria, and Morocco. Notably, TRM's data shows that several of these ban countries still rank in the top 50 for adoption, suggesting that blanket prohibitions don't eliminate demand. They just push it underground, reducing safety and transparency.

For the industry to reach a billion legitimate, recurring users, the regulatory environment doesn't need to be uniform. But it does need to be clear enough that ordinary people and the businesses serving them can participate without constant legal uncertainty.

What's Actually Working

Not everything is stuck. Several trends are pulling in the right direction.

Stablecoins as the quiet on-ramp. The data increasingly suggests that stablecoins, not speculative tokens, are driving the most durable form of crypto adoption. In regions with currency instability (Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Nigeria), dollar-pegged stablecoins offer a practical tool that people actually need. Chainalysis's 2025 report showed stablecoin transaction volume reaching record highs, with newer options like EURC growing from roughly $42 million to over $7 billion in monthly volume within a single year. Major payment companies (Stripe, Mastercard, Visa) have launched stablecoin-linked products. This is adoption driven by utility, not speculation.

Abstraction making UX invisible. Account abstraction, smart wallets, and cross-chain messaging protocols are steadily reducing the number of decisions users have to make. Email-based wallet recovery, single-click cross-chain swaps, and gas fee abstraction (paying fees in any token) are moving from experimental to production-grade. The gap between "crypto app" and "normal app" is narrowing.

Regional adoption driven by real economic need. The strongest adoption numbers aren't coming from countries where people are speculating on memecoins. They're coming from countries where crypto solves a practical problem. India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Brazil, and Vietnam lead adoption indices not because of hype, but because of remittances, inflation hedging, and access to global financial infrastructure that traditional banking doesn't provide.

The Path to a Billion

The industry's internal debate between "educate users" and "make blockchain disappear" treats these as opposing strategies. They aren't.

Abstraction will reduce the amount users need to know. That's important. But even the most abstracted financial tools require some level of literacy to use wisely. People still need to understand what stablecoins are and why they might de-peg. They need to know the tradeoffs between custodial and self-custodial options. They need enough context to evaluate whether a yield opportunity is legitimate or a scam.

This is why structured crypto education matters as much as better wallet design. The walls between crypto and a billion users won't come down from one direction alone. Better UX removes friction. Clearer regulation removes fear. Stronger trust mechanisms remove doubt. And structured learning removes the competency gap that makes everything else harder than it needs to be.

The billion-user milestone will come. The trajectory and the underlying demand are both real. But getting there requires the industry to be honest about all five walls, not just the ones that are easiest to talk about.