The adoption atlas: who is using digital assets, and how?

Why it matters

Large global totals often combine incompatible definitions. A smaller number with a population, period and verb is more informative than a dramatic number without them.

Individuals: ownership is not payment

The Federal Reserve's 2025 U.S. household survey found investment holding more common than payment or remittance use. That result describes surveyed U.S. adults and a defined period; it cannot be promoted into a global user count.

Self-reports also miss activity performed through intermediaries and may be affected by recall, wording and willingness to disclose. Always preserve the questionnaire, denominator, field dates and geography.

Developers: activity is not adoption

Repositories, commits, contributors, deployed contracts and package downloads illuminate different layers of development. Forks, bots, duplicated code, private repositories and pseudonymous identities make a universal developer count fragile.

The useful question is narrower: is the relevant code maintained, reviewed, documented and used? Trend direction within a consistent method is usually more defensible than a cross-ecosystem league table.

Companies and institutions: follow the operating record

A treasury holding, a custody product, a settlement pilot, a tokenized fund and an exchange-traded product are not equivalent. Filings, approval orders, audited reports and production documentation carry more weight than conference remarks.

Institutional access expanded when U.S. exchanges were permitted to list spot bitcoin ETP shares in 2024. The SEC explicitly framed that action as limited and merit-neutral, so access should not be rewritten as endorsement.

Governments: distinguish four states

A government can study technology, regulate private activity, run a pilot or deploy public infrastructure. BIS central-bank surveys document active investigation, but a survey response does not establish nationwide use.

On-chain geography is also inferred. Project Atlas combines exchange and blockchain data, yet exchange location can differ from user location and address attribution may rely on incomplete public or proprietary evidence. Maps should expose those limits.