Will Web3 ever reach mass adoption ?

Where do we stand on Web3 mass adoption? In short: we have a trillion-dollar market cap but only a few million real daily active users and those users are split across dozens of competing chains.

According to Dappradar in Q3 2025, https://dappradar.com/blog/state-of-the-dapp-industry-q3-2025 , which is down 22.4% from the previous quarter. This is roughly in line with the actual statistics from Token Terminal with 21M users that are active on the top 10 blockchains. There is obviously a pareto principle meaning that the rest accounts for approximately 10-20%. We will ignore this for now. Btw, this number has been decreasing by 16% from 25m to 21m (Dec 2024 to date), a trend that is surprisingly underdiscussed. 

If we set this into relation with crypto owners: There are ~700m as of to date according to Cryptocom. Those 700m encompass active users and passive holders. But at least, these holders (“hodlers”) are hopefully crypto friendly enough to set them in relation to active users.  

If we conservatively assume that every daily active wallet is owned by 0.25 users or 1 unique user owns 4 wallets, then we come up with the following stats and I will ignore bots for now -  partly for simplicity, partly so this doesn’t get too depressing. 

Activity Ratio = Daily Active 5M / 700 M total crypto owners = 0.7% 

which is basically its DAU to MAU ratio. 

Let’s compare that with a game. Here we usually view a DAU / MAU ratio of 20-25% as high. You might rightfully say that these are completely different categories but if we assume that crypto’s aim is to become a general purpose technology that permeates daily lives of the masses, this benchmark is not so way off. In any case, if we compare it to boring banking apps, here DAU / MAU ratios might be around 10%. If crypto reached banking-level DAU/MAU (~10%), the active user base would be ~70m, not 5m. Under today’s valuation, implied value per user would fall from $600,000 → ~$43,000, still high. 

Furthermore, if we take the current crypto market capitalization and set it into relation with total number of daily active users, we come to a crazy figure: 

Implied value of daily active user = $3T total market capitalization / 5m daily active users = $600,000 

If we compare that to a single company market capitalization of, e.g. Apple, we come to a figure where crypto hopefully one day will end up. 

Apple’s current market capitalization is $4T. Its number of total active devices is 2.3b. While there are 1.4b iPhone users worldwide, I will assume 2b device users for simplicity. Hence we get:

 Value per user = $4 T market capitalization / 2b device users = $2,000 

 As a table including a gap to benchmark 

	Crypto	Benchmarks	Gap to benchmark
DAU / MAU	0.7%	~10% in banking	14x gap
Implied Value per user	$600,000	$2000 Apple	300x gap

True, Apple started 18 years ago while crypto’s first big cycle was in 2017. But there is one important driver or inhibitor depending on which side of the problem you look at it. The smartphone market at the software level is duopolistic whereas being mildly polypolistic on the hardware side. Crypto however, is what I would call hyper-polyopoly.  

While there might be many reasons for this sad usage situation per capita, fragmentation is definitely one key issue. There are currently around 40 L1 and 20 L2, so 60 in total which compete for the attention of developers and users. Lets calculate how many chains compete for 1 Million users: 

Chains competing for 1 Million Users = 60 Chains (L1 & L2) / 5 Million Daily Active crypto users = 12 Chains 

Let that sink in: you need at least a million daily active users to justify your potentially billion FDV but you are competing against 11 others for the same 1M users. 

Trends and Solutions: 

1. Slow Motion Consolidation: Given that treasuries are still big, this phase will take longer than the usual bubble burst leading to a bunch of Zombie chains.  

2. Pivot to Narratives: Multiple pivots will occur. Some blockchains have already jumped on the AI bandwagon. Some will enter into a more dapp-play as moving blocks gas-cheap is not a differentiator anymore. 

3. Bridges and multichain solutions will help a bit, but will not become a gamechanger as they increase developers complexity and smart contract risk 

4. Stablecoins will help drive mass adoption, the ones that succeed in making sure their rails are used will prevail. 

5. From horizontal to vertical marketing: Because of commoditization, some L1 and L2 will move towards vertical marketing. This is the area which I believe will be one of the most important factors in conjunction with a future long-term approach. What do I mean by that? While previous and current user acquisition has been focused on horizontal marketing campaigns such as KOLs, airdrops, throwing grants and just getting developers for the sake of filling the pipe, future marketing will focus hopefully on customer verticals. As we saw with commoditization in the traditional finance space in retail Web1-2, many financial firms have started to address the needs of specific verticals such as university students or other segments to grow their user base. 

Until this hyper-polyopoly is reduced and unless companies shift their focus to vertical marketing, Web3 will remain a massively valued technology layer sitting on a tiny active user base. The opportunity is huge - but so is the execution gap.

And by the way: Stay tuned regarding the segment of university students. Dracoon Ventures will soon be more active in this space as well.