We're All Early - The Daily Gwei #325
You may think you're late; but you're not.
Yesterday, ConsenSys announced that MetaMask had doubled its previous all time high of monthly active users reaching the massive 10 million user milestone. Well this is exciting, I’m not going to focus on MetaMask specifically in today’s piece (as I covered them back in October here) - instead, I’m going to paint you a bit of a picture showing just how early we all really are.
Source: https://twitter.com/ConsenSys/status/1432733249692790793
Would you believe me if I told you that only 320,000 Ethereum addresses have ever interacted with OpenSea? Well, it’s true, and you can view the dashboard that tracks these kinds of metrics here. Now, obviously each individual user can have multiple Ethereum addresses so this number is likely much lower than 320,000 and I would probably say that discounting it by at least 50% is a fair thing to do. So if we do this then we can conclude that OpenSea really only has 160,000 individual human users - and it still did $3.3 billion of trading volume in August. Now, imagine what this trading volume would look like if there was 10 million users (62.5x from here) - now you can see why even NFTs are still so early in their adoption cycle.
Of course, NFTs aren’t the only part of this ecosystem that’s early as for all of the amazing growth DeFi has already had - we haven’t seen anything yet. I mean, the total value locked in Ethereum DeFi is still only $90 billion (according to DeFi Pulse) which is literally a rounding error in the traditional finance space. Though even outside of this we can clearly see that DeFi has not been integrated with 99% of the existing world’s financial system, it’s not ubiquitous, and it’s still not dead simple enough for non-crypto natives to use. Of course, this will all change over time, but it’s just another example of how this industry is still in its infancy (even though it may not feel like it at times).
To make my point even clearer here: think about all of the other use-cases (DAOs, social tokens, web3 etc) and how we haven’t even seen them take off in a big way within crypto-natives yet either because the technology just isn’t ready or no really interesting apps have been built yet. It really is quite amazing to see how little attention the web3 space has considering how transformative it is - but I think in time this will change dramatically. And the funny thing is that this isn’t even a negative - by catching trends really early on, you can find the alpha and position yourself both socially and economically to take great advantage of it. After all, the best investors are those who see the opportunity before everyone else does.
I know it’s a bit of a meme to say “we’re still early” in this ecosystem but the data doesn’t lie - there are very clear metrics showing that we haven’t even gotten close to seeing what mass adoption looks like. So if you’re still wondering if you’ve “missed the boat” because certain assets are “already up so much” - don’t be - we’re still so very early.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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