[kkielhofner]

I see and hear this a lot (and the data clearly backs up your numbers) but what I can't figure out is - billions of dollars in transactions per day for what realized real-world value, exactly? A billion dollars in fees for what utility?

With > 5 billion internet users as a TAM overall adoption for crypto other than trading on exchanges (which is almost completely off chain and essentially has nothing to do with blockchain, really) is miniscule. Every block explorer, DappRadar, MetaMask stats, etc - literally any data shows completely insignificant user adoption (active addresses, number of transactions, etc) when compared to the billions of users that could become blockchain users by installing a piece of software in a few clicks.

I know it sounds like I dismiss it completely but I've been active in this space for the better part of a decade and I still can't figure out where the use case is -or- better yet, the killer app that would lead to user adoption resembling anything even close to the web in the 90s. It's been 8-15 years (depending on your starting line). Where is it? Where are the millions (really should be billions by now) of Joe Everyone daily active users?

Absent anything approaching a semblance of widespread adoption (from the data I referenced) the cynic in me says most of the "value" you reference is overwhelmingly from wash trading and a lot of other unproductive activity with no value or utility other than whatever angle those actors have.

[yokem55]

If it all is wash trading, it is a lot of money to be spent on it. The fees assessed by dex LP's and gas fees would make anyone doing a substantial amount of wash trading lose money quickly and the activity would burn out.

The 'real world' stuff naturally happens in the real world, and not on chain. An example - last year I used a lending app to cover some of my taxes for a few months. I deposited asset X that I didn't want to sell at the time, borrowed their bespoke stable coin against it, swapped that for USDC, withdrew the USDC to coinbase, swapped it to USD and put it in my bank account to pay my taxes. When I could pay it back, I basically did the reverse. And at the end of the day because the lending application was offering 'borrow incentives' with their governance token, I ended up slightly ahead in after paying their repayment fee and gas fees. And all this was done with only substantial human counterparty risk when it came to interacting with coinbase. I found that useful and certianly helpful to me in a real world way. But if you only looked on chain it would not look like anything in the real world was happening at all and just lots of virtual bits moving around.

[kkielhofner]

The ingenuity of financial activity (especially with regard to fraud) never ceases to amaze me. While I can't come up with a wash trading practice that's net positive a lot of research indicates plenty of people do[0]. The provided reference talks about unregulated CEXs but one can only assume given the chains themselves have no regulation whatsoever I can only assume the practice is rampant there as well.

I just can't understand where the monetary volume you speak of comes from when a tiny number of merchants, platforms, etc accept cryptocurrency payments and (again) the number of transactions, addresses, etc just don't line up. As one example Venmo processes similar monetary volume with similar fees[1]. The difference is they have roughly 78 million users and every time I open the app I'm greeted with a running list of all of the people I know sharing their various (and copious) often daily transactions. The numbers for Cash App and others are similar. ~1B$ of daily volume for 500k - 1m users vs (assuming crypto address = user, which it does not) vs ~1B$ of daily volume for 78 million users... Yeah, something is going on with crypto.

Thank you for elaborating on your use case as an example of "shuffling bits around". Of course I'm not familiar with the situation but again (speaking to my lack of imagination/creativity) I can't imagine undergoing what ends up being a complex 12 step process involving multiple entities to obtain what is essentially a short term loan. Interesting and cool you pulled it off but not exactly something I see the masses being able to accomplish.

[0] - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/what-is-...

[1] - https://www.businessofapps.com/data/venmo-statistics/