Crypto Winter Unlikely As ‘Astonishing’ User Growth Dwarfs Internet Adoption Rate: Macro Guru Raoul Pal

Former Goldman Sachs executive Raoul Pal expects there to be billions of new cryptocurrency users by the end of the decade despite any jitters investors may currently feel about the markets.

In a new discussion about recession and inflation on the Real Vision Finance YouTube channel, the macro guru digs into historical data comparing crypto adoption rates versus the early years of the internet.

“Crypto adoption is now massively outperforming the internet. It’s been growing at about 165% a year versus 85% for the internet for the same period of time now. This is the fastest adoption of any technology in all human history.

We are going to get to five billion users by 2030, i.e., full-scale adoption of crypto is as technology for the Internet of Value and a host of other things.

And a billion users comes in 2024 [even when] lowering the rate of growth again. I’m not assuming that growth stays as red-hot as it has been. In fact, growth has been slowing.

I think that is the magnitude of what is happening. And you can own this, unlike the internet, it’s much easier to own because you own a share of the network by owning the crypto.”

Pal continues to plot out early-stage growth and foresees unprecedented expansion as crypto outpaces the internet 76% to 43% later this year.

“The next chart shows it in a more dramatic way, which is not on a log scale. And we’re assuming the internet was growing at 43% a year from about year six.

Year zero in this case is 5 million users, we took crypto and internet users at 5 million and then looked at their growth as they adopted. After year six, the intent was growing 43% a year.

If crypto grows at 43% a year, it gets to year 10, which is four years’ time at 1.2 billion. But if it continues to grow at 76%, which is a lowering of growth, versus the 165% it’s doing now, we get to 2.8 billion.

These are astonishing numbers, the world’s never seen anything like this before. Whatever happens, whatever the trend rate of growth is, this is exploding, so the macro backdrop is massive.”

The Real Vision CEO does caution that the overall cryptocurrency market cap is currently not expanding, and while not an actual crypto winter, investors should be prepared to weather a bear market.

The macro investor concludes his remarks by saying that until network activity picks up, people can expect to see stagnant rates of adoption in the crypto space.

“If I look at how we look at the network, total crypto volumes [have] been trending sideways for a while now. Sideways volumes tend to lead to sideways markets, and that’s what we’ve had in crypto.

Volume has to grow over time to show network adoption, and we’ve not seen that.”

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Featured Image: Shutterstock/Warm_Tail/Natalia Siiatovskaia