It appears that blockchain growth projections never stop to amaze us. Have you ever heard about Satoshi Nakamoto? He is the guy that wrote the famous white paper about Bitcoin in 2008. From that moment, the blockchain has taken the business world by storm.
It is also interesting to note that the story behind blockchain technology goes far in the past. Its basic philosophy was actually conceived nearly three decades ago.
Today, we have a lot of blockchain statistics that ordinary people and experts regularly use in order to explain better the so-called “technology of the future.”
If it’s been able to make such an impact on various industries in just 10 years, just imagine what blockchain is going to look like in the near future and what impact it is going to have on the business world and ordinary users.
In this piece, we will present some of the most interesting blockchain statistics so you can grasp its power and potential.
Will the blockchain use become mainstream in the future? Will our generation live up to see public administration being run on a blockchain network? This article will give you the necessary facts and stats to evaluate all the information you get through media.
But before we start, we have to say why is blockchain so compelling and interesting. We need to explain first why this technology even holds a chance to change different industries as we know them, such as finances, for example.
- Blockchain-based cybersecurity applications spent $700 billion.
- 9 out of 10 people engaging in Bitcoin (cryptocurrency built on blockchain technology) are men, according to statistics.
- Banks that use blockchain could reduce its infrastructure costs up to 30%.
- More than 20 countries researched the concept of a national cryptocurrency.
- 9 out of 10 banks in Europe and North America were exploring blockchain trends in 2018.
- The Bitcoin market capitalization expanded from nearly $1.02 billion in Q1 of 2013 to approximately $72.37 billion in Q1 of 2019.
- By 2025, more than half of healthcare administrations will have utilized blockchain for everyday operations.
- Even the FBI owns bitcoins – 1.5% of the world’s total amount in circulation.
- There are 25,764,015 blockchain wallet users worldwide as of June 2018.
- The first well-known Bitcoin purchase was for pizza. Two pizzas were exchanged for 10,000 BTC on May 22, 2010.
Blockchain Stats — 2022 Edition
The following stats for 2022 and beyond will help you better understand this technology and why is it considered to be a game changer.
1. The concept of blockchain technology begins in 1991.
Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornet outlined the first product based on a cryptographically secured series of blocks in 1991. However, the technology we know today became popular almost two decades later, as blockchain statistics show. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto announced the Bitcoin whitepaper. It is still unknown if this pseudonym stands for one person or a group of people.
In any case, the whitepaper gave a solid incentive to the development of blockchain for different uses.
2. Which countries are most blockchain-friendly?
The flattering first place takes no one else but the world’s most reliable economy – Switzerland. This country is not only developed in terms of blockchain market size, but also in terms of attracting new blockchain-based startups to settle there.
Even large corporations decide to launch their blockchain projects from Switzerland. For example, Facebook’s digital currency called Libra is handled by a team located in Zug, Switzerland.
Other prominent countries include Thailand, Gibraltar for hosting a lot of international cryptocurrency exchanges, Bermuda because of tax-friendly policies, and Malta, which is now widely known for having the world’s fastest blockchain market growth.
3. At the moment, only 0.5% of the people in the world are using blockchain technology.
Only one half a percent of humans use blockchain technology today. Half a percent does not look as much, but it is around 40 million people.
Even the skeptics say that this number is going to quadruple in five years. Furthermore, in 10 years, more than 80% of the population will have some kind of contact with the blockchain technology, as blockchain stats show.
4. Blockchain technology will be worth $20 billion in the next five years.
The increasing number of businesses realize blockchain’s potential to disrupt all industries across the world. That said, it comes as no surprise that its total investments on the global level are expected to boom.
To be more precise, the world’s blockchain industry is expected to gain $20 billion in profits in the next five years. For comparison, the profit blockchain companies gained in 2015 was higher than $315 million.
According to blockchain industry trends, blockchain technology will become even more popular in the future and increase total blockchain revenue and investments across different industries.
5. Nine out of ten countries want to invest in blockchain.
It looks like the private sector is not the only one interested in blockchain technology. Even public administration and institutions intend to use some form of it. The word is that 90% of the countries in the world want a piece of the pie when it comes to blockchain usage.
You’re probably wondering what’s all hype about this tech, and whether it’s really worth all the news headlines. The truth is, it could come particularly handy for operations related to public administration.
Let’s just say that this innovative high-tech offers a new and transparent way of keeping records. For example, your personal data might be stored on a blockchain-based network, which is now becoming a standard practice, according to blockchain statistics.
Considering its safety standards, tamper-proof nature, and transparency, you would no longer need to prove your identity whenever you wish to take a loan or fund a startup, for example.
This is certainly going to speed up approval procedures, among other things. Let’s say you want to take a bank loan. Instead of waiting for manually verifying your credit score, a bank clerk could simply check your data stored on the blockchain network and verify your credit power in just a few seconds.
That said, blockchain can also help businesses improve their transparency, as blockchain growth statistics show.
6. 44% of gamers had either purchased or traded game items on a blockchain network.
Which group of people are the fastest to accept new trends? Gamers! So it is no surprise that 44% of them had to deal in some way with blockchain in 2018. They purchased or traded games, in-game tokens, characters, etc. by using bitcoins, ethers, and XRP, among other currencies.
7. Blockchain technology market size will be worth $7.59 billion by 2024.
Not only gamers and public administration are interested in following blockchain trends. Blockchain technology has numerous applications across various industries — transportation, financial services, retail, consumer products of any kind, logistics, healthcare, and many others.
Companies within these industries are all expected to incorporate blockchain technology into their everyday business operations at some point. However, considering that the technology is basically still young and not fully developed yet, now is the best time to jump on the bandwagon.
That said, experts believe that the entire market size will be worth $7.59 billion by 2024. The first step towards this milestone is adopting blockchain trends in 2022, and this process is already underway.
8. 13% of senior IT leaders have plans to implement blockchain in their everyday business operations.
Needless to say, IT is yet another industry that is going to reap the benefits of utilizing blockchain technology. To be more precise, currently, 13% of people in charge of IT operations at large companies have plans to implement blockchain in the near future.
What do they want to achieve by doing so? According to blockchain stats, they will reduce expenses of system maintenance and leverage their security levels.
9. Some of the largest companies in the world are exploring blockchain solutions.
Have you heard of JP Morgan? Or the Bank of China? You must have heard of Apple, Microsoft, and Walmart.
These are the names of the world’s biggest companies that are more than interested in exploring blockchain’s potential in the years to come. The reason is quite simple — they want fast, safe, and secure transactions. In fact, if they adopt the tech entirely, they could become the biggest blockchain companies in the world.
10. The total amount of bitcoins that can ever exist is 21 million.
The Bitcoin network is such that only a limited number of Bitcoin units can be produced — 21 million. When miners “mint” the final unit, it is not going to be possible to add any more bitcoins to the network.
This is the main reason why so many people and institutions do their best to accumulate as many bitcoins and other trending cryptocurrencies as possible during the “digital gold rush.” In just a few years, this task might become pretty much impossible to accomplish.
In any case, since it is not possible to mine additional units, Bitcoin is not going to suffer from inflation like the present, traditional currencies. For this reason, experts predict that 1 Bitcoin could be worth $1 million in the near future.
According to live Bitcoin stats, there are less than four million Bitcoins left to be dug. However, you should understand that Bitcoin mining is becoming more and more difficult as time goes by. This is not only due to more complex mining machines, but also due to the network’s protocol preset in such a way that it “mints” less new units every four years.
In other words, when the entire story set off around 10 years ago, Bitcoin miners were rewarded with 50 new bitcoins for their efforts. Today, this reward is 12.5 bitcoins, and it will reduce by half in the mid-2020 to 6.25. The final Bitcoin should be mined in about 110 years.
11. Bitcoin mining is spending more electricity than 159 countries combined.
Mining is a crucial part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and overall blockchain statistics in 2022 and beyond. It is a process responsible for maintaining blockchain networks upon which cryptos are created, and also responsible for creating new units of digital coins.
As the value of Bitcoin started going up rapidly over the past five years, mining also became more prominent. It became a source of secondary income to such an extent that miners around the world used more electrical power than 159 countries combined.
According to the Bitcoin statistics graph, Bitcoin mining is calculated to use around 29 TWh per year – more than African and Balkan’s countries combined.
12. The first well-known Bitcoin purchase was for pizza.
The first known purchase conducted using Bitcoin happened on May 22, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two pizzas at Papa John’s for 10,000 bitcoins. This might have been the biggest mistake of his life.
To understand how much money he lost, we will say that Peter Saddington bought Lamborghini vehicle just a few years later for “only” 45 bitcoins, according to Bitcoin statistics.
Today, one bitcoin is worth around $10,000.
13. The top 500 computers in existence are 100,000 times less powerful than the Bitcoin network.
The top 500 computers that currently exist are 100,000 times less powerful than the entire Bitcoin network. A supercomputer would have to work 24 hours, 7 days a week for decades to go through all the data that Bitcoin’s blockchain network processes in a second. This is a truly astonishing technological achievement, according to the Bitcoin statistics.
14. India, UAE, and Saudi Arabia believe that blockchain investments will make them stand out from the crowd and help leverage their economies.
TATA Communications study discovered that developing countries could adopt blockchain, IoT, and other new technologies faster than developed countries. This hardly comes as a surprise. Considering the facts that IT technologies make our lives so much easier and that blockchain growth contributes to innovative solutions which are both cheap and simple to use, developing world is clearly going to rip the benefits of adopting them for everyday business operations.
This is particularly beneficial for less developed countries which cannot invest as much as their Western counterparts. However, if they invest wisely in this new and revolutionary technology, the developing countries might even outrun advanced societies in terms of general technology use.
Generally speaking, blockchain adoption statistics point to Malta, which is also known as the Blockchain Island, or the most developed blockchain soil at the moment.
15. Regulatory issues and ROI are the main reasons why companies are not investing more in blockchain.
The Deloitte study investigated why corporations are not investing more in the blockchain development. The most common response was related to complicated regulatory issues.
Another reason is that investors were worried about the ROI of blockchain-based projects. Of all respondents, only 6% found no obstacles to greater blockchain usage.
16. Most of the institutional investors acknowledge that business leaders have a poor understanding of blockchain technology.
Pollright, a market research company, interviewed 71 institutional investors in December 2018 and January this year. Investors belong to the pension and hedge funds niches. The results of the research are not promising at all.
Less than 10% of them think that senior industry executives understand all about blockchain, while one-third believes that they do not know enough. Almost two-thirds don’t know anything about the blockchain technology.
17. One industry is set to reap the benefits of adopting the tech — healthcare.
According to the same stats, the interviewed professionals believed that the healthcare industry is going to significantly benefit from adopting blockchain solutions.
Things like storing patients data on a decentralized network open up a plethora of new possibilities for further blockchain growth. Experts believe that decentralized storage systems are much safer than traditional systems, even more so than currently popular cloud technologies.
18. Bitcoin’s price rapidly increased in 10 years.
When it was launched back in January 2009, Bitcoin was basically worthless. Not only small amounts of bitcoins were in circulation, but also demand was almost non-existing. For these reasons, it’s initial value was $0.003.
According to Bitcoin wallet stats, in February 2011, the value reached $1. In July of the same year, one Bitcoin was standing at $31 and then fell to $2 by the end of the same year.
At the end of 2012, the Bitcoin price reached $13, while during the next year it was in the $650–$800 scope. In 2014, the value of Bitcoin reached $745 but then fell sharply to $317 by the end of the year.
A year later, the price of Bitcoin was $760, while in November of 2017, it grew to $19,498, its all time high as of August 2019. At the end of 2018, Bitcoin dropped to $3,832, and by mid-June, it regained strength by breaking the $13,000 mark.
Obviously, this is a huge contribution to the overall blockchain market size in 2022.
19. There are crypto ATMs at 79 countries worldwide.
When it comes to crypto ATMs, the first appeared in late 2013, and there were 1,000 of them in 2017. There were just over 2,000 ATMs in 2018, and this number has been increasing ever since.
The United States has the most crypto ATMs — almost 3,000. Canada and Australia come second and third. Together, they have more than 1,000 ATMs combined.
20. Blockchain statistics Gartner calculates that blockchain will produce a yearly sales value of more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years.
PwC’s Global Blockchain survey from 2018 provided some great insights into how much companies are interested in blockchain technology. According to its findings, blockchain-related businesses are only going to grow exponentially and generate large sales volumes.
To be more precise, it is expected that blockchain-powered sales will gather more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years.
According to Blockchain statistics from 2018, 14% of companies are not involved in blockchain industry at all. Around 20% of companies are at the research stage, while the highest percentage (32%) are in the development phase.
As you can see, the blockchain revolution is not over yet. We are yet to see its full potential in the years to come.
Conclusion
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, we believe that it is safe to say that the blockchain growth rate would be much faster if people and business leaders were more confident about using it.
Surveys report that blockchain has the potential to disrupt the way people took care of their business for centuries. As more organizations put their resources in the development of the blockchain technology, we could expect of it to gain significant traction as it cuts costs, increases ROI, and leverages the overall security of using digital services.
Blockchain statistics predict that the blockchain could give us a whole new level of information exchange. Even more important, the way blockchain could connect and automate the entire world represents the whole new value for businesses and ordinary people.