“We have 716 million crypto owners. So why aren’t they using anything?”

The assumption behind that question is that there’s been some catastrophic activation failure — that the industry has poured hundreds of millions of people into the top of a funnel, only to lose them before they ever touch a wallet, a dapp, or an on-chain interaction.

But that interpretation gets the entire situation backwards.
There is no funnel to fix. There is no mass of “inactive users” waiting to be converted.

What actually happened is much simpler:
716 million people hired crypto for one job — speculation — and that job was completed the moment they bought an asset.

Crypto didn’t “lose” those users. It satisfied their job perfectly.

That’s the core misunderstanding the industry hasn’t reconciled with.
Speculation is a functional job, but it’s not a daily job. You buy the coin, you hold it, maybe you check the price, and then you leave. Nothing about that job pulls you back into the ecosystem. There’s no emotional reward for returning. There’s no social reinforcement. There’s nothing to do.

Yet the industry keeps interpreting this as a distribution failure, when it’s actually a Jobs-to-Be-Done mismatch. Crypto succeeded at the job most people hired it for — and stopped there.

To see this dynamic up close, consider a recent conversation I had with “Reg.”
Reg is not the casual user the industry hopes to convert. He’s an inventor, a founder, someone who routinely lives years ahead of the curve. If anyone should be active on-chain, it’s him.

He owns crypto.
He believes in the idea of programmable money.
He’s exactly the kind of person Web3 builders imagine when they talk about “early adopters.” And yet when the conversation turned to Farcaster and wallets, his immediate response was:

“I need to finally make my Coinbase wallet… and fund my Coinbase wallet.”

Here is someone who already believes in the value of the technology but still hasn’t taken the first step into active use. Not because he’s unwilling; throughout our conversation, he repeatedly expressed curiosity and a desire to explore. He minted tokens. He clicked through apps. He wanted to understand.

But the ecosystem wasn’t ready for him. His reactions captured the reality:

“It still feels a little scammy.”
“I’m an early adopter. And this is barely ready for me.”
“UX is no one’s strong suit in this ecosystem yet.”
“It’s so messy and crazy. There’s so much.”

This isn’t someone failing to convert.
This is someone whose only crypto job — gaining asset exposure — was satisfied years ago, and who hasn’t yet encountered a second job worth returning for.

Reg isn’t the exception.
He’s the exact prototype of the 716 million.

Daily behavior emerges when a product serves not one but multiple Jobs-to-Be-Done simultaneously — functional, emotional, and social. When all three align, behavior becomes automatic. When only one is present, behavior is episodic.

This is the real difference between the 716 million and the 40–70 million.

The people who use crypto every day aren’t doing it because they’re more “crypto-native” or because they enjoy friction. They use it because their JTBD stack is deeper.

Their functional needs extend beyond speculation — they transact, create, coordinate, earn, settle, and build. Their emotional needs are met — they feel seen, creative, valued, early, and empowered. And their social needs are integrated — they belong to communities that matter, they contribute visibly, and they participate in shared ownership with real economic alignment.

Farcaster is a perfect illustration of this.
My daily use of the platform has nothing to do with the novelty of Web3 and everything to do with what it enables:

I can earn directly from my creativity.
I can contribute to communities that matter to me.
I can build a reputation tied to real economic interactions.
I can feel the presence of a small but deeply aligned group of builders.

That’s why DAU/MAU hits one for committed creators: not because they “love the tech,” but because their full spectrum of jobs gets satisfied every day.

When an industry sees hundreds of millions of people at the top of a funnel and only tens of millions active at the bottom, the instinct is to diagnose a distribution problem. But crypto’s problem isn’t distribution. Crypto has solved awareness. It has solved desire. It has solved the initial functional job that pulled those hundreds of millions in.

What it hasn’t done is create additional jobs worth sticking around for.

The mistake is assuming that the 716 million should or want to behave like the 40–70 million. But these groups aren’t the same. They have different needs, different motivations, and different definitions of value. Treating them as one cohort creates a story that feels like failure, even though it simply reflects a lack of depth in the job stack for most people.

The gap is not motivation.
The gap is not intelligence.
The gap is: “What am I supposed to do here that matters to me?”

Reg asked that exact question — implicitly — at every turn.

The next decade in Web3 will belong to the founders who recognize that mass adoption won’t come from pushing more people through a funnel. It will come from creating new jobs for people to hire crypto for. Jobs they perform frequently. Jobs that feel rewarding. Jobs that involve other people. Jobs that, once started, become habits.

Some of these jobs are functional in ways Web2 can’t match: instant global settlement, programmable payments, trustless escrow, direct creator monetization, micro-income flows, and frictionless coordination.

Others are emotional: feeling valued, feeling seen, feeling ownership, feeling part of something early, feeling aligned with a mission instead of captured by a platform.

And others are social: belonging to communities with real stakes, collaborating through shared ownership, building a visible reputation that compounds, participating in networks where identity and contribution actually matter.

When these three job dimensions converge, ecosystems grow on their own.
When they don’t, users behave exactly like Reg — curious, intrigued, willing, but inactive.

Crypto doesn’t have a demand problem.
Crypto doesn’t have a distribution problem.
Crypto has a JTBD depth problem.

716 million people hired it for one job.
Forty to seventy million hired it for three.

The founders who build products that satisfy all three job dimensions — functional, emotional, and social — will create the daily habits that pull the rest of the world on-chain. They will be the ones who transform crypto from something people own into something people use.

Mass adoption won’t come from fixing a funnel.
It will come from expanding the set of jobs crypto can be hired to do.

State of Crypto 2025 – a16z crypto
Global crypto ownership, active onchain users, and ecosystem metrics.

State of Crypto Interactive Dashboard
Active wallet users, address activity, developer metrics.
https://stateofcrypto.a16zcrypto.com

Coinbase Public Metrics
Registered users, monthly transacting users.
Coinbase shareholder letters and quarterly filings.

Interview with “Reg”
Onboarding experience and user-level insights.
https://app.fireflies.ai/view/Reg-JC::01K77RNFGW0XZ0ZNT69DVMBMFA