Crypto is One ‘Growth Cycle’ Away from 5B Users and Global Mainstream Dominance

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The cryptocurrency industry, like an overzealous farmer watching his crops grow, is nearly there. With one final push, it could be on the brink of full-scale mainstream adoption, where digital assets are as common as your grandma’s knitting needles. If you believe industry insiders, that is.

As of the end of 2025, there were around 659 million cryptocurrency holders worldwide, according to a December report from Crypto.com. Impressive, right? But hold on to your hats, because this is just the beginning.

Thomas Prévot, head of operations at Crypto.com in France (who, by the way, was probably sipping a cocktail at the Waib Summit in Monaco while delivering this prophecy), claims that cryptocurrency is set to surpass 5 billion users in the next decade. That’s right. Billion. With a B. No, not just 1 billion. 5 billion.

“We’re about one growth cycle away from full mainstream adoption,” Prévot announced, not bothered by the fact that the rest of us were still trying to figure out how to buy Bitcoin on our phones. “I’m not talking about 1 billion users. I’m talking about 5 billion users.”

In his slightly-rosy view of the future, he envisions a world where crypto becomes as ubiquitous as credit cards. And who’s to argue? I mean, we’ve all seen the future, right?

But not so fast. Prévot tempered his enthusiasm, noting that the real crypto breakthrough might not happen until the next market “down cycle” comes and goes. Ah, the old rollercoaster of crypto-up, down, and then back up again.

Once we hit that billion-user milestone, crypto will apparently be more mainstream than a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte in autumn, according to popular Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo. He predicts that Bitcoin could hit an “ultimate price” of $700,000 per token. Yep, you read that right-$700,000 for a single coin. No biggie.

The Pathway to 1B Crypto Users: Retail “Price Speculation” or Blockchain Use Cases

So, how do we get there? The answer, folks, lies in retail “price speculation”-otherwise known as the retail hype train. If you’ve ever seen a meme coin surge from “lol” to “whoa” in a matter of days, then you know exactly what I mean. Roy van Krimpen, general manager for OKX exchange in Western Europe, suggests that this is exactly what got us to this point. According to him, we’ve seen this before in 2021, where retail speculation quadrupled the market in a matter of months. Seems like a familiar pattern, huh?

“We’ve seen that in 2021, where the market more than quadrupled in a span of a few months due to retail speculation and investors,” Van Krimpen said, like it was no big deal.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=DByVWY_br7Q[/embed]

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2025-09-01 17:01