If you thought the crypto world was on fire in 2024, you’re not wrong! Prices skyrocketed, but when it comes to new users hopping on board, the story gets a bit murkier.
A new report from Flipside highlights some surprising trends about user activity across various networks.
The user growth dilemma
While the crypto industry saw impressive growth this year, most major chains struggled to attract new users.
Flipside’s report reveals that networks need to focus not just on numbers but also on the quality of user engagement to transform casual users into valuable, long-term contributors.
The big winner in the user growth game is Base, the layer-2 network launched by Coinbase, and it experienced a quite nice 56x increase in monthly users this year.
By October, the total number of newly acquired users across the crypto space hit 19.4 million, with Base alone accounting for 13.7 million of that total, almost eight times more than its closest competitor, Polygon.
Base didn’t just stop at attracting casual users, but it also pulled in 15.1 million so-called super users, those who executed over 100 DeFi transactions. That’s 38.4% more than Ethereum, which managed to 10.7 million super users.
Ethereum still strong
Speaking of Ethereum, it had a solid year too, as the second-largest crypto network averaged about 1.56 million new users each month and outperformed its layer-2 counterparts like Arbitrum and Optimism.
In terms of DeFi super users, Ethereum seduced 10.9 million, far surpassing Arbitrum’s 6.2 million and Optimism’s 1.8 million.
Bitcoin’s struggles
Despite BTC’s historic climb above $100,000 and the hype around spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S., new user growth was pretty lackluster.
In fact, Bitcoin only gained about 935,900 new users monthly this year.
During Bitcoin’s major rally in March, there was a nice bump of 19.2% in acquired users, but things took a nosedive after the U.S. elections in November when new users dropped by 28.5%.
Flipside points out that this trend suggests more speculative activity among existing Bitcoin holders rather than a wave of fresh faces joining the network.
