It has taken crypto 16 years to get to 580 million users. The Internet took ~36 years (from the first dial-up connection in 1969) to reach 1 billion users by 2005. While it took 36 years for the Internet to hit 1 billion, it added 3.5 billion more in the 15 years after (2005–2020) with the rise of things like smartphones, social networks, and emerging markets. If crypto’s tipping point unleashes the same kind of post-1 billion acceleration we saw with the web then we could see 3.5 billion users—almost half the planet—in less than a decade. An estimated 5.5 billion people have smartphones. ~70% of them use those phones for payments. From Grok: The adoption rate of LLMs has been exceptionally rapid. For instance, ChatGPT, released in November 2022, reached 100 million users in just 60 days, a milestone that highlights its explosive growth. By comparison, it took the internet 7 years to reach a similar level of global penetration, and Facebook took 4.5 years. As of 2024, LLMs have around 1 billion monthly users. LLMs, particularly ChatGPT, are widely regarded as the fastest-adopted technology in history.
