Bobby Ong - Up Next: 1 Billion Tokens, $50T Market Cap - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Every day more and more people are getting to crypto. From first-time traders trading memecoin to institutions buying Bitcoin. Crypto adoption is growing globally and is not slowing anytime soon. The question has evolved from if crypto will survive the next bare cycle to really how big and how fast will crypto win. Ladies and gentlemen, let me share our views on how we'll get towards a billion tokens and 50 trillion in market cap.

Let's take a look at the crypto market as a whole. The sum of all cryptocurrencies today, the total crypto market cap is roughly $4 trillion today. This may seem like a large number, but to put things into perspective, this is really just the size of one stock, Nvidia. The entire market, the entire industry is just the size of one stock. We're not even the size of the Mac 7, nor are we the size of the S&P 500.

What this means, it means we are early. You're still so so early, but to get to where we are today at $4 trillion market cap, it hasn't been a smooth journey. The market has increased 20x from 2020 from 0.2 trillion to 4.1 trillion, but it has seen many ups and downs.

We have seen regulators clamping down of crypto in the US previously. We have seen many collapses such as FTX, Terra and so on. And plenty of skeptics But things have changed now. The industry has prospered, has persevered and so on. Regulations have eased up under the current administration.

And the crypto market couldn't be any better. The institutions, the Wall Street is here. Let's take a look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been the best performing asset since 2024. It's returned 173% far outperforming gold, equities, and foreign currency.

The chart on the right shows the growth of money supply and Bitcoin. The pink line shows the growth of global money supply. It's roughly doubled in the last 10 years. The white line shows the price of Bitcoin. It's roughly kept pace with the growth of global money supply.

Fiat currency is getting debased and there's a flight towards quality. Bitcoin and many investors are seeing is the quality assets that people are looking for to get towards uh to hold to hold value as a store of value. Stable coins have also found product market fee in the industry. It's increased 60s grown 60x in the last 5 years from 4.8 billion to 294 billion.

294 billion may sound like a large number, but to put things into perspective, that's just 1% of the US dollar M2 money supply. The large majority of stable coins are USDT and USDC and the US government has recently in July passed the Genius Act. This has provided regulatory clarity to many financial institutions, banks and companies to launch their stable coins. US Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has cited projections that stable coins are projected to grow towards $3.7 trillion by the end of this decade and it's really not hard to see how we get there.

Other countries are seeing how the US has put in place regulatory clarity and has seen strong growth in USD stable coins are seeing for and are getting forward are getting forward to try to launch their own stable coins. The ECB, for example, is looking to launch digital euro on the public blockchain. And even the Chinese government is looking to launch CNY offshore offshore CNY stable coins. Even if 10% of all stable coins are non USD, it's really not hard to imagine how we get to $4 trillion by the end of this decade. Now, let's take a look at the total number of tokens that have been launched globally.

This is a chart of the number of tokens that we track on Gecko Terminal. Currently, there are 16.7 million tokens that have been created. I used to go on stage 10 years ago on crypto conferences and say that anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized. I think this vision is holding true today.

Back then if I wanted to launch my own coin, say Bobbycoin, it wasn't the easiest thing to do. I had to go about set up a proof of work chain. I could find miners to validate my chain, secure the network and so on. And then I have to go and find an exchange to find a trading venue for my coin. But today, if I want to launch my own token, all I need to do is to go to one of the dozens of token launchpads out there, click a few buttons, and boom, I have my token up and running.

And then this token can be traded on a decentralized exchange easily. We used back in July 2021, we only had like 70,000 tokens being created daily. But in August, we had 3 million tokens created in a single month alone. Based on this projection, we are going to hit 100 million tokens by early 2027 and a billion tokens by 2030. When we look at the number of chains created is also been growing steadily.

We now track 304 chains on Gecko terminal and however behind this picture behind this number is a very different story. Competition between chains have been very intense. If you take the 304 chains and we filter them by the number of chains with daily trading volume above a million dollars, then this number goes down to 57. If you tighten the criteria and say that look, let's look at chains with over $10 million in daily trading volume, then this number goes down to only 27. What this means is that ladies and gentlemen, the vast majority of chains are zombie chains.

These blockchains are struggling to find developers. They're struggling to find users to adopt and use these chains. But that hasn't deterred large companies, corporations, tech companies from launching their own chain. Kettle has recently launched Plasma. Circle has announced that they're looking to launch Arc.

Google Cloud is looking to launch Google Cloud Universal Ledger. And perhaps the most ambitious of all, Stripe has announced that they're launching Temple. Why are all these companies looking to launch their own chains? Don't we already have enough chains out there? executives in these companies realize that this is a trillion dollar opportunity and it's an opportunity that is way too big to be ignored.

So they are looking to launch their own chain. We expect to see more companies, more chains coming up because this opportunity is too big. This is a chart of the most popular categories of Coin Gecko over the years. Categories come and go and we at Coin Gecko track over 10 new categories on a monthly basis. Back in 2022, categories such as NFT, gaming, metaw, fan tokens, play to earn are some of the more popular categories.

But today, they're no longer in the top 10. Look at where we are today. The most popular categories are memecoin, AI, AI agent, RWA, DeFi, and so on. Perhaps, or maybe not so surprising, memecoin has been cryptosperennial favorite and has stayed at a top for the past few years. BSC, Solana, Ethereum are some of the more popular chains.

Base and Sui are some of the new newcomers and the top chains. And then we have Bitcoin, Hyper uh Vit Tensor and Hyperliquid as the app chain uh competitors these days. To get crypto mainstream, we'll need more users getting onchain. We went from 1.2 million users onchain to roughly 27.

5 million users onchain. This may seem large, but actually it's a small number. A vast majority of crypto users still prefer to use crypto wire centralized intermediaries. Binance earlier this year mentioned that they have 275 million users, 10 times more users than anyone trading onchain and they onboarded 80 million users this first five months of the year. We have a long way to go to bring users onchain.

But that said, trading is increasingly more onchain. It used to be the case that trading onchain used to be very clunky. The UX was bad. The liquidity was bad. The fees were not great either.

But today, UX has improved. Liquidity is great. Fees are low. People are used and getting familiar with trading onchain. Hyperlquid is the star performer of the cycle.

and they are the largest perpetual decentralized exchange and they're standing tall even among centralized inter centralized peers. It is the fifth largest decentralized perpetual exchange by open interest and the eighth largest by trading volume. If you look at the sport decks to sex trading volume ratio, this number used to be about 5% in 2021 slowly creeping up to about 10% and today is roughly about 17% or so. There's a spike on the chart which shows 36% and I asked my team is this correct or was this an was this correct? Was this data correct and they said that's true.

This was caused by Binance integrating Pancake Swap while their program called Binance Alpha. Centralized exchanges are realizing that users are looking to move to onchain to trade. They want to be they don't want to be limited by the number of tokens that they can trade. So they are integrating onchain trading within their centralized platform. So Binance have done that with Binance Alpha.

And perhaps what's most surprising is Coinbase a few months ago integrated air drrome which is a DEX on base onto the centralized platform as well. I've spent a lot of time talking so far without really talking probably the biggest catalyst for the cycle so far institutions. Institutions are here. Wall Street is here and they're buying our bags. They're buying our bags via digital asset treasury companies and exchange rate funds.

So far there are 150 global debt codes that have been launched and they have acquired cumulatively $74 billion in crypto. All these companies are seeing the successes that Michael Sailor and Strategy are doing with their Bitcoin accumulation strategy and are looking to replicate this success with their own public company. The vast majority of assets or crypto that have been purchased have been Bitcoin and we are starting to see more Ethereum, Solana Det and a few other DET codes launching as well. It's the same story with exchange traded funds. ETFs has been a success story.

We have seen over $70 billion in net inflow since the inception. Black Rockck's sport Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, has seen over $70 billion in AUM, the fastest growing ETF in history. The vast majority of ETFs have been Bitcoin with Ethereum fast catching up. As the SEC relaxes rules on ETFs further, we will expect to see more sport crypto ETFs launching, making crypto available to a larger investor base and thereby making it more accessible. At the end of the day, we are still very early.

A lot of investors still cannot buy crypto from their brokerage firms. TD Armory Trade, Charles Schwab, these are some of the largest brokerages in the US still don't allow crypto trading on their app. It's just a matter of time before these brokerages realize that their users want crypto and they'll be forced to integrate crypto trading onto the app. NASDAQ has also started looking into allowing spot crypto trading and then there's a lot of talks about launching tokenized stocks globally as well. What this means ladies and gentlemen, this is where we are today.

We are currently in the yellow box, the yellow ball around $4 trillion in market cap. It's really not that hard to see how as crypto becomes more mainstream, as more companies build on crypto, as crypto gets abstracted away, as more uses come onto blockchain, as more real world assets come onto blockchain, we start to see this market easily 5x to the size of Max 7 or $20 trillion. And as we grow further, it's really not that hard to imagine by the end of this decade, we get towards $50 trillion in market cap, the size of the S&P 500. We're still very early, ladies and gentlemen. The next decade belongs to crypto.

Thank you very much.