Original author: Crypto Weituo (X: @thecryptoskanda)

Old investors know that every time the market is down, people blame the market for not attracting Web2 users, so no new money comes in. This is the so-called "Mass Adoption" narrative, that is, Crypto's "Web3" products must cater to Web2's non-profit-oriented users.

This logic is like "African children will starve to death because you waste food in China", which makes sense but makes no sense.

Mass Adoption - First understand who Mass is?

Who are MASS “the masses”? Don’t just generalize to traditional Web2 users — Bullshit. “The masses” are a group of different but categorizable individuals.

The blind man does not drive a domestic electric car, not because he does not support domestic products, but because he does not have a driver's license (no demand). Anything can continue to attract users because users have irreplaceable needs and it provides irreplaceable solutions. This is true for cars and Crypto.

Whether you agree or not, Crypto has boundaries. All its features (privacy, decentralization) come from its core value - permissionlessness, which is not available to most people on the planet. Permissionlessness is mainly to deal with restrictions on freedom by banks, governments and large companies: banks don't allow you to open accounts and make payments freely, but you insist on it; the government doesn't allow you to invest, speculate or gamble, but you insist on it; large companies and governments restrict speech, but you insist on it.

Those who have needs are definitely not the majority, as most people are domestic animals disciplined by the system. Rather, they are the "marginalized people in society" who know how to arbitrage and are anti-establishment - I call the characteristics of such people "businessmen" (of course, personality traits are not black and white, but are like a spectrum, with differences in strength and weakness).

They may not actually be engaged in business, or even have money, but they are destined to be a minority, otherwise their rule cannot be maintained.

These people will "talk business as business". If ordinary people think that getting a good job means selling themselves to the middleman "the unit" at a wholesale price, then the audience of Crypto is the kind of people who want to fully price all their time, energy, connections and other resources and sell "themselves" at a good price. This kind of people must have making money as their primary goal.

Might we already be Mass Adopted?

So among the “businessmen” spectrum I just mentioned, how many people have not come into contact with Crypto?

According to the United Nations data, the average annual income of adults worldwide is 23,000 U.S. dollars. If they take out 10% and invest in Crypto, no matter what they do, the 8 billion people in the world will have 18.4 trillion U.S. dollars. According to Binance's spot trading volume of 1.12 trillion U.S. dollars in March 2024, the spot trading volume alone will be more than 13 trillion U.S. dollars for the whole year. That means there is still more than 30% of room. Of course, if other exchanges are included, this number may have been exceeded long ago.

Of course, this is an average. If we really want to look at the top 10% of people in the world, they account for 52% of the world's total income, which is about 800 million people. http://Crypto.com says that the number of global cryptocurrency users will be 520 million in 2023, so there is still about 30% of space. After this 30% space is closed, we will see an annual growth rate similar to that of the gambling industry (about 4.7%), which is almost equal to the Federal Reserve interest rate.

You think there are no new users now because the market is about to reach its actual TAM limit. It would be strange if people with secondary or higher education have not heard of Bitcoin in 2024.

Do you still want to "send the show to the countryside" and "Mass Adopt" Web2 users? Anyone who is likely to be adopted by you has most likely already come into contact with the currency.

The stock market is never a problem, high-frequency users are

I have experience in the gambling industry. It is one of the largest industries in the world, including online and offline. From the perspective of the industry as a whole, using the logic of "Mass Adoption", there is no incremental market or stock market for gambling - in theory, all the rich people in the world are my market, because rich people have gambling nature. The growth of the gambling industry is growing with global inflation.

Offline gambling is still regional, while crypto is even global, and its performance is not affected by regional tourism. Therefore, the logic of Crypto and gambling is the same from the perspective of the entire industry. If the performance is not good in a year, it is not because there are no new users, just like a casino does not know how to compete for customer traffic. It is because the existing users have issued fewer codes and the frequency of betting is low.

There are two main types of people in casinos. One type is those who are particularly proficient in and addicted to one or two games, such as slot machines and baccarat. Most of them are old men and women (who go there every day and frequently). The other type contributes the most to the VIP room, which basically accounts for 80% of the casino (which can be understood as big customers).

The same logic: The essence of Crypto growth is the process of cultivating high-frequency and large users.

Mass Admission instead of Mass Adoption

How many people know how to calculate points on slot machines? How many people know how to play baccarat? How many people know how to play Texas Hold'em? Learning these things is more expensive than learning to play coins: complex rules, the courage to gamble, the threshold for entry (membership, code issuance, etc.).

Why don’t casinos have an “adoption” problem? Because casinos provide an irreplaceable solution to an irreplaceable need (gambling). Casinos make it clear to customers: you come here to win money. If you want to win money in a casino, you must learn the casino’s rules. It is the casino that lets you in to gamble (Admission), not to cater to your other “daily needs” (Adoption).

It is hard to imagine a casino coming out and telling you "I want to build a social network for gamblers, so that they will actively spend more in our whisky bar instead of coming here with the purpose of winning money" - the development of the gambling industry is at most from offline to online, accepting multiple payment methods, cooler slot machine themes, and making the UX better.

Similarly, Crypto/Web3 needs to make it clear that "let them make money!" and allow "merchants" from all over the world to come here and try to make money, provided that they learn the rules of Crypto. The way they make money is to play games involving money flows (trading, staking, lending, etc.), and everything revolves around this logic.

Those who don’t play by the rules (such as not reading the three-game theory when doing projects, and only listening to KOLs speculating on coins), and those who are too bad at playing and go bankrupt, are eliminated. The proficient ones left are high-frequency users who have formed muscle memory. The best of them are invited to the VIP room. The so-called construction is to allow more people to participate in the trial, participate in the trial faster, have more diverse and cool trials, make the total bets bigger, and make the game more continuous, and provide gamblers with things to show off their status (gambling halls sell watches and luxury goods, and in Crypto it is NFT?). This is not only about project selection, but also about growth.

Summarize

Mass Admission is a core logic for me to look at and do projects, and it is even the first logic I think about. Using this logic, think about why memes, inscriptions, and Solana are popular, but not the entire ETH series (except Base), VC coins, and RWA? Why do I say that what is most lacking is dev rather than "users"?

I believe you will have different answers.

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