[dvt]

> In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.

While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity via thousands of transactions to make certain assets seem more valuable than they were).

So even though you're technically correct, I think there's a big "but" when looking specifically at crypto land. To make matters more confusing, a lot of liquidity pools and trading is done in non-USD denominated terms. For example, you trade in some weird staking pair sABC/sXYZ (where both of these are some random staked token, maybe not even pegged). And there might be some down-the-road sXYZ/XYZ and XYZ/ETH transaction you can do (and ETH/USD even further down the road), but I'm not exactly sure if you can count your sABC/sXYZ trade as "volume." Even though Coingecko and other token portals will certainly list both sABC and sXYZ in USD terms[2] (market cap/volume).

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/arbitrage-bot-s-spam-attack-o...

[2] https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/lido-staked-ether

[hailwren]

What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption?

This is a vacuous non-sequitur.

[dvt]

> What bearing does the existence of fake liquidity have on the equivalence between real liquidity and adoption?

I was just trying to elucidate the fact that it's hard to differentiate between real and fake liquidity (and therefore, real and fake adoption) in crypto.