Facts: Retail is not interested in BTC. Retail is chasing alt plays, NFTs and other trades where they can make money, and not Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s network effect is stagnating massively and growth is falling off a cliff.

First of all, its wrong to say retail is not in crypto anymore – Anecdotal, I was just in an NFT free mint that got sold out in literally 10 mins. Its a little obscure project which might very well go to zero in about 2 weeks, but even this one’s discord server has over 10k users in just about 3 days.

And there are hundreds if not more such NFTs projects all over cryptoverse. This is all retail for you.

Now, lets not turn this into NFT hate thread, I like to gamble on NFTs, some gamble on sports, some gamble on coins..so let that be.. its not the main topic of this post.

My point is that the retail are still in crypto as a whole. Some of them surely left with the crash, but many are around. To mint these NFTs you definitely need some crypto. Activity across many networks are still growing. OpenSea still is guzzling gas and is the top most used dapp.

The retail are just not interested in BTC at all. Many users are playing play to earn games or gambling NFTs. They are just not interested in buying Bitcoin

Key stats:

BTC activity is still at 2018 bear market levels. It hasnt grown at all. https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions

This one is even more worrying for BTC – people have literally stopped using BTC since July: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,1y,weight

There is no network effect growth whatsoever. Without network effect, the price doesnt grow much. In the absence of clear valuation models like discounted cash flow, network growth and volume transacted has been used to arrive at valuations for networks/blockchains, and here you have BTC’s network growth falling off a cliff.

With other networks, people are not just investing and forgetting about it, but actively doing things – whether its lending or swapping tokens or minting some dumb jpeg. This brings people to explore the network, as seen by the rise in number of participants in almost every chain that has managed to get limelight. All of these chains have growing txn/day stats.

With Bitcoin, all one can do is invest and forget. In contrast to the above networks, the txn/day is still at 2018 levels.

A BTC argument is that LN adoption is increasing, but there is no real evidence for that. You cannot know how many LN transactions happen a day, and just volume increase to a few hundred million cannot substantiate tremendous growth.

Sound money, censorship resistance etc are all good narratives but if the network usage is stagnating like above, it is really a cause to worry.