[Note: the views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

It’s the beginning of a new quarter so that means its time to look at the last quarter and find out where public blockchain traction and usage is taking place, or not.  After all, we are continually bombarded by cryptocurrency enthusiasts each day telling us that exponential growth is occurring.  Or as GIF party posters like to say, “It’s Happening!” — so in theory it should be easy to find.

For more background, see previous posts from January and April.

Softballs

• P2SH usage: above are two charts from P2SH.info which illustrates the movement of bitcoins into what most assume are multi-sig wallets of some kind.  There has been a visible increase over the past quarter, with about 200,000 or so more bitcoins moving into P2SH addresses.  Year-on-year, bitcoins held in P2SH addresses has increased from 8% to 13%.

• OP_RETURN: above is a line chart from Opreturn.org which illustrates various 3rd party applications that typically use the OP_RETURN field in Bitcoin as a type of datastore (e.g., watermarked tokens).  It is hard to see it on this time scale but the average transactions during Q1 were roughly 1,500-2,500 per day whereas in Q2 it was a bit higher, between 2,500 to 3,500 per day.

• Above is another chart looking at the percent of OP_RETURN transactions used by different watermarked token platforms.
• Compared to Q1, the top 5 have shifted:
  • Blockstack 142,754 transactions (24.9%)
  • Colu 106,489 (18.6%)
  • Open Assets  82,696 (14.4%)
  • Monegraph 54,914 (9.6%)
  • Factom 47,328 (8.3%)
• While Blockstack (Onename) still rules the roost, Colu has jumped ahead of the other users.  This is slightly interesting because the Colu team has publicly stated it will connect private chains that they are developing, with the Bitcoin network.  The term for this is “anchoring” and there are multiple companies that are doing it, including other Bitcoin/colored coin companies like Colu.  It is probably gimmicky but that’s a topic for a different post.
• Incidentally the 5 largest OP_RETURN users account in Q2 for 75.8% of all OP_RETURN transactions which is roughly the same as Q1 (76%).

Above is a weekly volume chart denominated in USD beginning from March 2013 for LocalBitcoins.com.  As discussed in previous posts, LocalBitcoins is a site that facilitates the person-to-person transfer of bitcoins to cash and vice versa.

While there is a lot of boasting about how it may be potentially used in developing countries, most of the volume still takes place in developed countries and as shown in other posts, it is commonly used to gain access to illicit channels because there is no KYC, KYCC, or AML involved.  Basically Uber for cash, without any legal identification.

Over the past 6 months, volumes have increased from $10 million and now past $13 million per week. For comparison, most VC-backed exchanges do several multiples more in volume during the same time frame.1

Hardballs

In April, several Bitcoin promoters were crowing about how “stable” Bitcoin was.  Not mentioned: cryptocurrencies can’t simultaneously be stable and also go to the moon.  People that like volatility include: traders, speculators, GIF artisans, pump & dumpers. And people who don’t like volatility: consumers and everyday users.

What articles and reporters should do in the future is actually talk to consumers and everyday users to balance out the hype and euphoria of analysts who do not disclose their holdings (or their firms holdings) of cryptocurrencies.2

As we can see above, volatility measured relative to both USD and EUR hit a five month high this past quarter.  The average user probably would not be very happy about having to hedge that type of volatility, largely because there are few practical ways to do so.  Consumers want boring currencies, not something they have to pay attention to every 10 minutes.

And ether (ETH) was even more volatile during the same time frame: doubling relative to USD during the first half of the quarter then dropping more than 50% from its all-time high by mid-June.

Counterparty is a watermarked token platform that, as shown in previous quarters, has hit a plateau and typically just sees a few hundred transactions a day.  Part of this is due to the fact that the core development team has been focused on other commercial opportunities (e.g., building commercial products instead of public goods).3

Another reason is that most of the public interest in “smart contract” prototyping and testing has moved over to Ethereum.

As shown in the chart above, on any given day in Q2 the Ethereum blockchain processed roughly 40,000 transactions.  In Q1 that hovered between 15,000-30,000 transactions.  Note: the large fluctuations in network transactions during the spring may coincide with issues around The DAO (e.g., users were encouraged to actively ‘spam’ the network during one incident).

In addition, according to CoinGecko, Counterparty has lost some popularity — falling to 14th from 10th in its tables from last quarter.  Ethereum remained in 2nd overall.

Another trend observed in the last quarterly review remains constant: Ethereum has significantly more meetups than Counterparty and is 2nd only to Bitcoin in that measure as well.

We’ve discussed “long chain” transactions ad nausem at this point but I have noticed on social media people still talk about the nominal all-time high’s in daily transactions as if it is prima facie evidence that mega super traction is occurring, that everyday users are swarming the Bitcoin network with commercial activity.  Very few (anyone?) digs into what those transactions are.  Perhaps there is genuine growth, but what is the break down?

As we can see from the chart above, while non-long chain transactions have indeed grown over the past quarter, they are still far outpaced by long chain transactions which as discussed in multiple articles, can be comprised of unspendable faucet rewards (dust), gambling bets and a laundry list of other non-commercial activity.

Furthermore, and not to wade into the massive black hole that is the block size debate: even with segwit, there will be an upperbound limit on-chain transactions under the current Core implementation.  As a consequence some have asked if fee pressure would incentivize moving activity off-chain and onto other services and even onto other blockchains.

This may be worth looking into as the block size reaches its max limit in the future.  As far as we can tell right now, it doesn’t appear users are moving over to Litecoin, perhaps they are moving to Ethereum instead?  Or maybe they just pack up and leave the space entirely?

Wallets

We have looked at wallets here multiple times.  They’re a virtually meaningless metric because of how easy it is to inflate the number.  What researchers want to know is Monthly Active Users (MAU).  To my knowledge no one is willing to publicly discuss their monthly or daily user number.

For instance, two weeks ago Coinbase reached 4 million “users.”  But it is almost certain that they do not actually have 4 million daily or monthly active users.  This number is likely tied to the amount of email-based registrations they have had over the past four years (circa May 12, 2012).

Similarly, Blockchain.info has seen its “users” grow to just over 7.8 million at the time of this writing.  But this is a measure of wallets that have been created on the site, not actual users.

Any other way to gauge usage or traction?

Let’s look in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Last October Abra launched its GoAbra app and initially rolled it out in The Philippines.  This past May, when CoinDesk ran a story about the company, I looked in the Google Play Store and it says the app had been downloaded 5,000 times.  Last week, Abra announced it was officially launching its app into the US.  As of this writing, it was still at 5,000 downloads.

“Wait,” you might be thinking to yourself, “Filipinos may prefer the iOS app instead.”

Perhaps that is the case, but according to data as of October 2015, Android has a ~81.4% market share in The Philippines.  Furthermore, the iOS version for some reason doesn’t appear on App Annie.  So it is unlikely that Abra has seen traction that isn’t reflected in these download numbers yet, perhaps it will in the future.

Anything else happening in the stores?

As of this writing, the top 5 Bitcoin wallets in the Google Play Store in order of appearance are:

• Andreas Schildbach’s Bitcoin Wallet (1 million downloads)
• Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet (100,000 downloads)
• Coinbase (500,000 downloads)
• Blockchain.info (100,000 downloads)
• Airbitz (10,000 downloads)

The Apple App Store does not publicly state how many times an application has been downloaded.  It does rank apps based on a combination of user ratings and downloads. The top 6 on the iPhone in order of appearance:

• Coinbase
• Blockchain.info
• Sollico (bitWallet)
• breadwallet
• Xapo
• Airbitz

Interestingly however, the order is slightly different in the App Store on an iPad.  The top 6 are:

• Coinbase
• Blockchain.info
• Sollico (bitWallet)
• breadwallet
• Airbitz
• BitPay (Copay)

It may be worth revisiting these again next quarter.  If you want to burn some time, readers may be interested in looking at specific rank and activity via App Annie.

Incubators

Most new cohorts and batches at startup accelerators and incubators usually only stay 3-4 months.  A typical intake may see 10-15 companies each get a little bit of seed funding in exchange for a percentage of the equity.  During the incubation period the startup is usually provided mentorship, legal advice, office space, access to social networks and so forth.  It is common place to hear people of all stripes in Silicon Valley state that 9 out of 10 of these startups will burn out within a couple years — that the incubator relies on one of them having a big exit in order to fund the other duds.4

500 Startups, Boost.VC, Plug and Play, YCombinator and other incubators have added and removed startups from their websites and marketing material based on the traction startups have had.  And cryptocurrency startups are not too different from this circle of life. 5

For instance, at YCombinator, Bitcoin-specific mentions on applications has declined by 61% over the past year.

Based on pubic information, as of this writing, it appears that out of the roughly 100 Bitcoin-related startups that have collectively come and gone through the incubators listed above, just a handful have gone on to raise additional funding and/or purportedly have active users and customers.  Unfortunately, no one has consistently published user numbers, so it is unclear what the connection between funding and growth is as this time.

In fact, in an odd twist, instead of measuring success by monthly active users, customers, or revenue, many Silicon Valley-based companies are measuring success based on how much money they raised.  That’s probably only a good idea if the business model itself is to always be raising.

For example, 21inc regularly boasts at being the “best funded company in Bitcoin” — but has not stated what traction four separate rounds of funding have created.  How many bitcoins did it mine prior to its pivot into consumer hardware?  How many 21 computers were sold?  How many users have installed 21?  And what are its key differences relative to what Jeremy Rubin created in 2014 (Tidbit)?

Again, this is not to single out 21inc, but rather to point out if companies in the public blockchain space were seeing the traction that they generally claim to on social media and conferences — then as discussed in previous posts, they would probably advertise those wins and successes.

Hiring

With funding comes hiring.  Since it is very difficult to find public numbers, there is another way to gauge how fast companies are growing: who and how many people they are publicly hiring.

The last Bitcoin Job Fair was last held in April 2015.  Of its 20 sponsors, 6 are now dead and ~7 are either zombies and/or have have done major pivots.  It is unclear how many people that were hired during that event still work for the companies they worked for.

Where else can we look?

Launched in 2014, Coinality is a job matching website that connects employers with prospective employees with the idea that they’d be compensated in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and dogecoin.  Fun fact: Coinality is one of the few companies I interviewed for Great Chain of Numbers that is still alive today and hasn’t pivoted (not that pivoting in and of itself is a bad thing).

It currently lists 116 jobs, 105 of which were posted in the past 2 months.

A number of VC-backed companies and large enterprises (or head hunters recruiting on their behalf) have listed openings in the past month.  For example: WellsFargo, Blockchain.info, Circle, Fidelity, IBM, KeepKey, itBit, BNYMellon and SAP logos pop up on the first couple pages of listings.

Among the 67 job listed in June, twenty-six of the positions were freelance positions cross-listed on Upwork (formerly known as Elance / oDesk).

Notable startups that are missing altogether: many cryptocurrency-centered companies whose executives are very vocal and active on social media.  Perhaps they use LinkedIn instead?

Other stats

• According to CoinATMRadar there are now 690 Bitcoin ATMs installed globally.  That is an increase of 78 ATMs since Q1.  That comes to around 0.86 ATM installations per day in Q2 which is a tick higher than Q1 (0.84).
• Bitwage launched in July 2014 starting out with zero signups and zero payroll.
  • Fast-forward to January 2016: Bitwage had 3,389 cumulative user signups and cumulative payroll volumes of $2,456,916
  • Through June 2016 it has now reached 5,617 cumulative signups and cumulative payroll volumes of $5,130,971
  • While growing a little faster than ATM installations, this is linear not exponential growth.
• Open Bazaar is a peer-to-peer marketplace that officially launched on April 4, 2016.  It had been in beta throughout the past year.  The VC-backed team operates a companion website called BazaarBay which has a stats page.
  • It may be worth looking at the “New Nodes” and “New Listings” sections over the coming quarters as they are both currently declining.6

Conclusion

It is unclear what the root cause(s) of the volatility were above.  According to social media it can be one of two dozen things ranging from Brexit to the upcoming “halvening.”  Because we have no optics into exchanges and their customer behavior, speculation surrounding the waxing and waning will remain for the foreseeable future.

Based on process of elimination and the stats in this post, the likely answer does not appear to be consumer usage (e.g., average Joe purchasing alpaca socks with bitcoins).  After all, both BitPay and Coinbase have stopped posting consumer-related stats and they are purportedly the largest merchant processors in the ecosystem.

Most importantly, just because market prices increase (or decreases), it cannot be inferred that “mass adoption” is happening or not.  Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence: there should be ample evidence of mass adoption somewhere if it were genuinely happening.

For instance, the price of ether (ETH) has increased 10x over the past 6 months but there is virtually no economy surrounding its young ecosystem.  Mass consumer adoption is not happening as GIF artisans might says.  Rather it is likely all speculation based — which is probably the same for all other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.

About a year ago we began seeing a big noticeable pivot away from cryptocurrencies to non-cryptocurrency-based distributed ledgers.  That was largely fueled by a lack of commercial traction in the space and it doesn’t appear as if any new incentive has arisen to coax those same businesses to come back.  After all, why continue building products that are not monetizable or profitable for a market that remains diminutive?

Let’s look again next quarter to see if that trend changes.

Endnotes

1. For more granularity see also BNC’s Liquid index. [↩]
2. Speaking of interest and hype, CB Insights has some new charts based on keyword searches over time. [↩]
3. Several members of the development team also co-founded Symbiont. [↩]
4. Many of these incubators are too young to have a track record that proves or disproves this “conventional” wisdom.  See also Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money from HBR. [↩]
5. For instance, Mirror closed its Series A round 18 months ago, but was removed from Boost’s website because it no longer is involved in Bitcoin-related activities.  Boost currently lists the following companies out of the 50+ Bitcoin-companies it has previously incubated: BlockCypher, BitPagos, Abra, Stampery, Fluent, SnapCard, Verse.  500 Startups has removed a number of startups as well and currently lists the following on its website: HelloBit, Melotic, Coinalytics, BTCJam, Bonafide, CoinPip. [↩]
6. Since it has only been “launched” for a quarter, it is probably a little unfair to pass judgement at this time.  But that hasn’t stopped me before.  OpenBazaar has a lot of growing pains that its developers are well aware of including UX/UI issues.  But beyond that, it is unclear that the average consumer is actually interested in using peer-to-peer marketplaces + cryptocurrencies versus existing incumbents like Alibaba, Amazon and eBay — all of whom have customer service, EULAs, insurance policies and accept traditional currencies. I had a chance to speak with one of their investors at Consensus in May and do not think their assumptions about network operating costs were remotely accurate.  Furthermore, where is the market research to support their thesis that consumers will leave incumbents for a platform that lacks insurance policies and live customer service?  Note: OB1 developers and investors insist that their reputation management and arbitration system will increase consumer confidence and customer protection. [↩]