Today we are excited to announce that $DESO is now officially trading on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro. You can read the full announcement from Coinbase here.
We believe that this is a crucial step for the DeSo blockchain, and the DeSo Foundation wanted to share some thoughts on why this is such an important event.
Bringing Crypto to the Mainstream
If you’re reading this post, it’s highly likely that you are well-versed in crypto and Web3. When you are deep in this bubble, it’s easy to feel like everyone has the same exposure. But for all of the hype in recent years around crypto, very few people have actually had any meaningful interaction with crypto or blockchains.
Some will find it shocking to learn that a mere 3.9% of the global population holds any cryptocurrency whatsoever. The numbers feel even more underwhelming when you look at daily activity, with only 400,000 daily active addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain on average.
Even blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana, which support a wider variety of applications on their networks see relatively paltry numbers. In 2021 Ethereum only saw an average of 615,000 daily active addresses, and Solana’s most popular dapp only saw an average of ~15K DAUs over the past month.
All of these stats all build towards the larger point, which is that cryptocurrency has still not made meaningful progress towards mainstream adoption.
Contrast these data points with the fact that Facebook has over 2.89 BILLION monthly active users and the core issue becomes obvious. If crypto ever wants to see high levels of adoption the industry will need to change the trend of only building niche financial applications and start to consider the needs of the majority of the people on this planet.
We believe that DeSo can change this trend. By providing the only layer 1 blockchain capable of scaling social media apps, we have created the bedrock for the first wave of mainstream decentralized social media applications, which will one day reach billions of people.
Partnering With an Industry Leader
Before anyone can engage with any layer 1 blockchain, they first need a simple on-ramp to onboard their fiat currency from their bank and exchange it for the native crypto currency of the blockchain.
That is where Coinbase comes into play. There is no denying the fact that no company has made more progress towards simplifying the onboarding process for cryptocurrency ownership than Coinbase. With over 73 million users and a suite of tools and assets, Coinbase remains the gold standard.
We are excited to partner with Coinbase and believe that the synergies will be immense. With our ecosystem of 120+ apps (and growing) appealing to mainstream audiences, we will provide many more people a reason to download the Coinbase app and to buy their first cryptocurrency.
Similarly, Coinbase’s existing base of users and their programs like Earn, will help provide an immediate influx of new users to the DeSo blockchain and new holders of $DESO.
The Market Opportunity
We’d like to end by emphasizing the fact that we are truly in rarefied air. While Coinbase has increased their total number of listings over the last few years, very few of these listings are native coins of layer 1 blockchains.
For reference, tokens (like COMP and USDC) are assets that live on top of underlying blockchains. Whereas coins (like BTC and ETH) are the native cryptocurrency of the underlying blockchain. Layer 1 coins are inherently more valuable than other tokens, because they underpin the value of all other tokens on the blockchain, and are needed in order to provide liquidity to the exchanges built on top of them.
While it is much more difficult to get a layer 1 asset listed on Coinbase, accomplishing this task means joining an elite group of blockchain projects.
As of the time of this writing, the top 10 layer 1 assets on Coinbase all have a market capitalization of at least $10 Billion+.
DESO for comparison, is still hovering ~$1B total market capitalization, despite being the only legitimate layer 1 blockchain in the Decentralized Social space, which arguably has the potential to be bigger than Decentralized Finance.
The DeSo Foundation has long seen the vision of making the internet a truly open and equal playing field as it was originally intended to be. We are excited to take one step closer to help the rest of the world realize this vision as well.
Note: None of the information above is financial advice. We encourage everyone to do their own research on the DeSo Blockchain and wider crypto ecosystem. For more information about DeSo, feel free to check out the rest of our blog.
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