How Big the Crypto Audience Is in 2026, and Where Its 741 Million Owners Watch

The headline number is 741 million crypto owners in 2025, up 12.4% from 659 million in 2024, according to Crypto.com's Crypto Market Sizing report published on 16 January 2026. Bitcoin accounts for the largest share, 365 million owners, just under half the total. Ethereum reached 175 million.

One caveat matters more than any single figure, and Crypto.com states it plainly: these are on-chain estimates, built from "a combination of on-chain data with blended parameters", not a survey. There is no sample of respondents and no margin of error. Treat 741 million as a well-reasoned estimate of a number that cannot be counted directly, not as a headcount.

The composition is shifting, too. Bitcoin still holds the largest share at 365 million owners (49.3%), but its owner base grew only 8.3% across the year, while Ethereum's grew 22.6% to 175 million. Crypto.com also notes its on-chain estimate leaves out some regulated exposure: a further 300,000 to 1.2 million people, by its reckoning, hold Bitcoin through US spot exchange-traded funds rather than directly on-chain. The direction of travel is more owners, spread across more assets, than a Bitcoin-only picture would suggest.

The 741-million figure is a full-year 2025 count, and the climb to it was steady: Crypto.com's mid-year H1 2025 report had already put owners at 708 million. Independent projections for 2026 push past a billion owners, though a projection is a model, not a measurement, and should be weighed as one. For planning, the implication is simple. The addressable audience is growing rather than plateauing, and the platforms that hold its attention are the same ones gaining share of total watch-time. A sizing done today is more likely to understate than overstate the market you are buying into a year from now.

Search for the size of the crypto audience and you will find numbers from the high-500-millions to more than a billion. The spread is not sloppiness; the sources are measuring different things.

A wallet is not a person. One owner can hold a dozen wallets across chains and exchanges, and a single custodial wallet can hold balances for millions of users. So a count of active addresses runs far above a count of people, while a count of people who self-report owning crypto in a survey runs below it, because not everyone answers and not everyone who owns will say so. Andreessen Horowitz has argued the field should separate "real" active users from nominal wallet counts for exactly this reason: its own analysis has put real monthly crypto users in the tens of millions, against active-address counts in the hundreds of millions.

It shows up directly in the published range: survey counts of self-reported owners have run in the high-500-millions, on-chain owner estimates like Crypto.com's land at 741 million, and forward projections for 2026 reach past a billion. None is simply right or wrong; each answers a slightly different question. When you cite an audience number, the discipline is to say which of the three you mean, and to pick the one that matches the decision.

A count of owners tells you the audience exists. It does not tell you where to reach them, and this is the join almost no sizing page makes. The attention data is unambiguous about one thing: it is concentrated in video.

YouTube reaches 84% of US adults, the widest reach of any platform in Pew Research Center's "Americans' Social Media Use 2025", released 20 November 2025. That study surveyed 5,022 US adults between 5 February and 18 June 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 points. TikTok reaches 37% of US adults in the same study and skews young, with roughly half of 18- to 29-year-olds opening it at least once a day. Reach is one measure; time spent is another, and it points the same way.

In Nielsen's May 2026 Gauge report, YouTube took the single largest slice of total US television watch-time at 13.8%, ahead of Disney at 10.0% and Netflix at 8.0%; streaming as a whole reached 48.6% of all TV. Two things are worth pausing on. Streaming crossing 48.6% means internet-delivered video is now within touching distance of half of all American television time. And the platform leading it is not a studio, it is YouTube, a creator platform of user-made short and long video, out-watching Disney and Netflix. When the widest-reach platform and the most-watched platform are the same creator-video surface, the channel decision gets simpler.

One caveat is essential and easy to forget: these Pew and Nielsen figures describe US adults and US television, not the global population of 741 million crypto owners. They tell you where attention concentrates in a large, measurable market, not the viewing habits of every owner worldwide.

The addressable audience is not the owner count. It is the owners in a market multiplied by the reach you can achieve on the platforms in that same market, and the phrase "same market" is the whole rule.

You cannot multiply a global 741 million by a US reach of 84%, because the two numbers describe different populations, and the result would be a fiction. A defensible estimate matches geographies: owners in a country, times a platform's reach in that country, capped by the smallest number you can actually verify. Every reachable-audience figure you build this way is your own arithmetic on the inputs you chose, never a published benchmark. The same discipline guards against the opposite error, quietly shrinking the audience by stacking caveats until nothing is left. Sizing is not about the biggest number, or the safest one. It is about the traceable one.

The takeaway for a budget is short. The crypto audience is large, three-quarters of a billion owners, and its attention sits overwhelmingly in short-form and streaming video, on the platforms Pew and Nielsen measure as the widest-reach, most-watched surfaces there are. Reaching it efficiently means being native to that video, at the volume the platforms reward.

Volume is the operative word. One brand account posting one clip reaches a sliver of a platform that reaches 84% of US adults; the same footage cut and distributed across a network of creators compounds toward the reach the sizing implies. The gap between the audience that exists and the audience a campaign touches is closed by distribution, not by a bigger ad budget, which is why sizing the audience and planning its distribution are really one exercise, done in that order.

That is what crypto clipping campaigns at Lumina Clippers do, through a network of 62,900+ vetted clippers who have driven 18B+ verified views. To go deeper on the numbers, see the full short-form video statistics; for the economics, what crypto marketing costs; for the playbook, how to market a token launch; and for the mechanics, short-form video distribution.

Owner counts. Crypto.com Research, "Crypto Market Sizing 2025", 16 January 2026, and the companion note "Global Cryptocurrency Ownership Reaches 741 Million in 2025". Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), on measuring real crypto users, on separating real active users from nominal wallet counts.

Attention. Pew Research Center, "Americans' Social Media Use 2025", 20 November 2025 (5,022 US adults, 5 February to 18 June 2025, ±1.9 points). Nielsen, "The Gauge," May 2026 report.

Method. The 741 million owner figure is an on-chain estimate, not a survey, and carries no margin of error. The Pew and Nielsen figures describe US adults and US television, not the global owner population. Any reachable-audience number built from these is arithmetic on stated inputs, matched by geography, never a published benchmark. Sources checked at publication, 4 August 2026.