The Next 100M Web3 Users Won't Come From DeFi — They'll Come From Daily Life

This article is part of daGama's weekly blog series exploring the intersection of physical-world experience, on-chain infrastructure, and the future of how people discover and interact with the places around them.

Here is a number that should reframe how you think about where Web3 is actually going: 560 million.

That's how many people own cryptocurrencies or use Web3 tools as of early 2025. It sounds large. And it is — roughly 6.8% of the global population, a genuine milestone for a technology that barely existed fifteen years ago.

But here's the problem with that number: almost none of those 560 million people came to Web3 through daily life. They came through speculation, trading, gaming, or because someone in their network was already in it. They came because Web3 gave them a reason that had nothing to do with where they eat, where they travel, what they discover, or how they spend an ordinary Tuesday.

The next 100 million users won't come that way. They can't — that channel is already saturated. The people who will join crypto because of crypto are largely already in. The next wave will come from somewhere else entirely: the texture of everyday life.

Where the Current 560 Million Came From

To understand why daily life is the next frontier, it helps to be honest about who the current Web3 user actually is.

Monthly active users of Web3 dApps globally range between 5 million and 10 million in 2025 — a remarkably small number given the headline crypto ownership figures. The gap between "owns crypto" and "actively uses Web3 applications" is enormous. Most of the 560 million are passive holders. They bought tokens on a centralized exchange, maybe moved some to a wallet, and haven't touched a dApp since.

Web3 wallets face a roughly 70% user drop-off rate during onboarding due to complexity and jargon. The people who stuck around despite that friction are, by definition, a self-selected group — technically curious, financially motivated, and willing to tolerate an experience that most people would simply abandon.

Only 13% of US consumers feel confident that they understand the meaning of Web3. That's not a marketing problem. That's a product problem. The technology has been built, almost entirely, for people who already understand it.

The distribution of where Web3 adoption is actually happening tells the same story. Emerging markets have the highest adoption rates: Nigeria at 84%, South Africa at 66%, Vietnam at 60%, the Philippines at 54%, and India at 50% report wallet ownership exceeding half their online populations. In most of these cases, adoption is driven by real economic necessity — remittances, inflation hedging, access to financial services that don't exist locally. These users came to Web3 because Web3 solved a daily life problem. Not a DeFi problem. Not a trading problem. A problem they had on a Tuesday morning.

That pattern is the signal. The largest concentrations of Web3 adoption don't come from DeFi yield strategies. They come from places where the technology solves something ordinary people actually need.

The DeFi Ceiling

DeFi is genuinely remarkable infrastructure. The ability to lend, borrow, swap, and earn yield without a bank or broker — on open, composable protocols — is one of the most significant financial innovations of the last decade. The total value locked in DeFi surpassed $123.6 billion in 2025, marking a 41% year-on-year increase.

But DeFi has a ceiling on its addressable audience, and that ceiling is much lower than the Web3 community tends to acknowledge.

Using DeFi requires: a non-custodial wallet, an understanding of gas fees and transaction confirmation, familiarity with slippage and liquidity pools, comfort with smart contract risk, and enough capital that the fees are worth paying. That's a real barrier. Not insurmountable — but real enough that the population of people willing to clear it is much smaller than the population of people who might theoretically benefit from it.

About 46% of non-users cite a lack of familiarity as the key barrier to Web3 adoption, and 26% are unsure how to get started. These aren't people waiting for a better DeFi protocol. They're people waiting for a reason to engage that doesn't require them to become a blockchain expert first.

DeFi also has a deeper problem: its primary value proposition is financial. And while financial products are important, they're not what most people think about most of the time. The average person has dozens of interactions with the physical world every day — buying coffee, finding a restaurant, navigating a new city, choosing where to spend an evening — and zero of those interactions currently involve Web3 in any meaningful way.

That's the gap. And it's enormous.

What Daily Life Actually Looks Like as a Web3 Entry Point

Think about the behaviors that define ordinary life for most people.

They check reviews before going to a restaurant. They ask for recommendations when traveling somewhere new. They return to places they trust and avoid places they've had bad experiences with. They share what they find — photos, opinions, discoveries — on platforms that capture their attention without compensating them for the value they generate.

Every one of these behaviors involves exactly the kind of information problem that Web3 is architecturally suited to solve: trust, verification, ownership, and incentive alignment.

The review you leave on Google goes to Google. The local knowledge you've built over years of living in a neighborhood goes to a platform that sells advertising against it. The experiences you share become someone else's data asset. You get nothing — not even the guarantee that what you shared will influence what someone else sees, since algorithmic curation and paid placement sit between your review and the people who might benefit from it.

This is the model Web3 can disrupt. Not by replacing the behavior — people will always share their experiences and seek recommendations — but by changing who owns the data, who gets compensated for generating it, and how the trust of the information is established.

62% of Gen Z prefers brands offering token-based rewards. That's not a fringe preference. That's the majority of the largest consumer demographic alive right now signaling that they want their engagement to mean something beyond a like or a follow. The incentive model that Web3 enables — where verified participation earns real rewards — is exactly what this audience is already looking for. They just haven't found it in a context that applies to their daily life yet.

The Infrastructure Is Ready. The Use Case Is Not.

One of the persistent frustrations in Web3 is the gap between the infrastructure that exists and the consumer applications that have been built on top of it.

The infrastructure side has made remarkable progress. Modern wallets increasingly support "anything-to-anything" token swaps across 100+ chains. Account abstraction has eliminated most of the key UX barriers — gasless transactions, social login, one-click wallet creation. Stablecoins processed nearly $5 trillion in the first half of 2025 alone — a sign that the payment rails are mature enough to handle real-world transaction volume.

The consumer application layer hasn't kept pace. Most of what's been built for consumers in Web3 is either financial (trading, staking, yield) or speculative (NFTs, gaming items with token economics). Both are real use cases. Neither is a daily life use case for most of the world's population.

The daily life use case requires something different: a reason to open the app that has nothing to do with your portfolio. A reason tied to where you are, what you want to do, and what you know about the places around you. A reward for the knowledge and experience you already have, not for the capital you're willing to deploy.

Location, discovery, and real-world experience are that use case. They're universal — every person on earth navigates physical space and has opinions about it. They're frequent — people make discovery decisions every day, multiple times a day. And they're currently served by platforms that extract value from users rather than returning it to them.

Why the Next 100 Million Will Look Different

The 560 million people currently in Web3 are, on the whole, a specific profile: younger, male, financially motivated, technically comfortable, and concentrated in markets where crypto solves an acute financial need.

Close to 70% of individuals in emerging markets plan to use at least one Web3 service, compared with only 7% in developed regions. The next wave of users will be broader, more geographically distributed, and far less defined by financial motivation. They'll come in because an app they're already using — for finding places, sharing experiences, navigating cities — happens to run on Web3 infrastructure. They won't know or care about the underlying technology. They'll care that it works, that it's fair, and that they're getting something real in return for their participation.

This is how every major technology transition has worked. Email didn't achieve mass adoption because people wanted to use TCP/IP. The internet didn't reach billions because people wanted to interact with HTTP servers. The infrastructure became invisible, and what remained was the experience.

Web3's mass adoption moment will look the same. Not a wave of people deciding to "get into crypto." A wave of people using applications that happen to be built on Web3 rails — and finding that those applications treat them better than the Web2 alternatives they're replacing.

The places people go every day are the Trojan horse. The technology rides in behind the experience.

daGama is building the verified discovery layer for the physical world — where real-world presence, on-chain identity, and genuine community knowledge converge to create the daily life use case Web3 has been waiting for. Learn more at dagama.world

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