Crypto.com Sees Number of Investors Tripling to 1 Billion by 2023

A decline in the value of cryptocurrency has dampened hopes for the digital coins to become more widely adopted, Bloomberg writes.

Trading platform Crypto.com had previously estimated that 1 billion people would invest in crypto before the end of 2022.

But a decline in the risk assets has seen the value dropping around 45% from their November all-time high.

Bloomberg wrote that this could revive fears of a long bear market like the one that happened in 2018.

That said, those who are riding the high of recent months are still excited, with investment analyst Gritt Trakulhoon saying 2022 would be the year you couldn’t say crypto wasn’t mainstream anymore.

Bloomberg writes that many people investing in the digital coins are doing so for speculative reasons and hoping to get a return.

There are still challenges for novice investors. There might be volatility ahead as the market deals with the rate increases from the Fed. And many individuals don’t know how to set up a Web3 application.

There still could be usage growing this year, according to some. They cite the increase in people using digital coins from the last year, in which ownership boosted 178% and hit 295 million investors.

According to FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, there’s still a chance crypto could hit the 1 billion-investor milestone.

“There are some applications that themselves have about a billion users, so if one of them ends up on-boarding many of their users to crypto, that alone could get you pretty close,” he said in an interview. “We’re not that far away already.”

PYMNTS recently wrote about the warnings of a “crypto winter,” with the market capitalization sitting at $1.6 billion – almost half of the high in November – showing that there’s a bear market going on.

Read more: Crypto Winter II: When, How Cold, How Long

The report said that in spite of a bit of an upturn this week, most of the top 20 cryptos are still down by double digit percentages.