Despite the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it seems like the cryptocurrency market is entering a new phase of economic stimulation, price increases, and overall market interest.
This statement is backed by a statistical report released by Apptoppia, according to which a record-breaking number of cryptocurrency wallet app downloads were logged during July 2020. With this in mind, 3.5 million wallets were downloaded to mobile devices during this month, which is 81% more when compared to July 2019. Furthermore, throughout this year, the number of active digital currency users increased by approximately 110%.
For the sake of comparison, app wallet downloads averaged about 2 million during the last year.
No research efforts have been made to categorize these users so far. Their crypto market intentions remain fairly-unknown, thus prompting several questions. Are today’s new users interested in value storage? Trading? Sending and receiving crypto?
This persistent trend is a clear indicator of rising user interest in the cryptocurrency market. In fact, the ecosystem is even close to mainstream adoption in certain areas of the world, where large portions of the people remain unbanked. Such is the case with Nigeria, where hundreds of thousands of people are actively creating cryptocurrency wallets. In regions like these, cryptocurrency serves as the perfect solution for monetary remittance or value storage, given the multiple problems associated with national monetary policies.
Over the last couple of weeks, while the top cryptocurrencies have remained fairly stable, DeFi tokens have faced considerable positive volatility through price increases and rising trade volumes. For instance, a token referred to as yearn.finance (YFI) has surpassed Bitcoin’s all-time high record, thus hitting a value of $32,859 at press time.
The rising popularity of DeFi-based tokens and services is also contributing to the increasing number of crypto wallet app downloads, but also to mass-adoption as a whole. Many experts believe that after DeFi tokens, the next big disruption will be central bank-backed digital currencies (CBDCs), as governments are gearing up to release their own digital currencies, fearing a long-lasting shift of the financial market.
It might take a while before the world truly enters a new financial era, thereby leaving this one behind. After all, the current aggregated market cap for cryptocurrencies is situated at $367 billion, still fairly low when considering the bigger picture.