For a long time, when people thought about crypto users, they pictured someone glued to a trading terminal, watching candles and chasing the next 10x. That image made sense in 2017. It made partial sense in 2021. In 2026, it’s just outdated.
Global crypto ownership has crossed 740 million people. Some forecasts put us on track to hit one billion by the end of this year. But here’s the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough — a16z’s State of Crypto 2025 report estimates that only 40 to 70 million of those hundreds of millions actually transact on-chain regularly. Which means somewhere north of 90% of crypto holders aren’t traders in any real sense. They’re holding, watching, waiting. And eventually, they’ll come for something more useful than price action. India is where that story starts to get really interesting.
We’re already the world’s largest national crypto user base, around 119 million people, ahead of the US and China. Chainalysis has ranked India number one on its Global Crypto Adoption Index for three consecutive years. And on-chain value received in India grew by 99% year-on-year in 2025. But what is far more compelling than the size of that number is who is driving it.
Over 75% of crypto activity in India now comes from non-metro cities Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4. The average investor age has gone up from 25 to 32. Women’s participation doubled last year. These aren’t people hunting 100x returns on a new memecoin at 2 AM. These are people who have a smartphone, a UPI account, and a genuine financial need that the existing system doesn’t serve well enough. That’s the user we are thinking about when I talk about the next wave.
Think about remittances. India received $129 billion in remittances in 2024 more than any other country in the world. The NRI sending money home still gets hit with fees and a 2-day wait. Stablecoin rails can make that instant and nearly free. It’s essentially UPI across borders. And given that UPI itself processed over 228 billion transactions in 2025, with more than 350 million active users who are completely comfortable with mobile-first instant payments, the behavioral foundation is already there. The question is just which product connects those two rails first.
Think about gaming. India already has over 14 million blockchain gamers. Globally, blockchain gaming hit 4.66 million daily unique active wallets in Q3 2025. These are people earning and spending in-game assets that happen to live on a blockchain. They don’t think of themselves as crypto users. They’re just playing.
Think about creators. India’s creator economy is a $1.46 billion industry, but 88% of creators still struggle to earn a reliable income largely because cross-border payment rails are expensive and slow. A creator getting paid in stablecoins directly by their community, in seconds, at near-zero cost, that’s not a crypto story for them. That’s just a better way to get paid.
And then there’s the entry point question. Gemini’s 2025 Global State of Crypto report found that over 30% of new crypto users globally started with meme coins. More importantly, 94% of those users went on to own other crypto. So community tokens and casual launchpads are working as actual on-ramps not dead ends for people who just want to participate in something they find exciting.
Nischal Shetty, Co-Founder, Shardeum
What makes all of this possible now, in a way it wasn’t three or four years ago, is infrastructure. Transaction fees on modern L1s are fractions of a cent. Account abstraction means you can log into a crypto wallet with your Google account and never see a seed phrase. Embedded wallets provision silently in the background. Aggregate on-chain throughput has grown more than 100x in five years.
The building blocks are in place. What’s needed now is products that reach people where they are mobile-first, simple, fast, and designed for someone who isn’t interested in a trading dashboard.
India has trained hundreds of millions of people to expect instant digital payments from their phone. That expectation is a gift to crypto builders. The next billion users don’t need to understand blockchain. They just need products that work. And we’re closer to that than most people realize.
