By Andrew D
Forty million people. That’s how many users were onboarded in crypto through mini-games on Telegram. And yeah, I watched this happen in real time. And the thing that stuck with me wasn’t the number itself — it was who these people were. Most of them had never touched crypto before. They didn’t know what a wallet was. They definitely didn’t care about consensus mechanisms. They tapped a button inside a messaging app they already used every day, and suddenly they owned a digital asset. That’s it. That was the whole onboarding flow.
And it worked.
I keep thinking about this because the crypto industry has been talking about “mass adoption” for a decade now, and for most of that time, we were building for ourselves. Complicated interfaces. Twelve-word seed phrases you’re supposed to write down on paper and store in a fireproof safe, apparently. Gas fees that required a PhD in timing. We kept saying we wanted a billion users while building products that confused our own friends.
But honestly, something broke open in the last couple of years. Notcoin did it first — turned token distribution into a tap-to-earn game on Telegram and pulled in millions of users who had zero crypto background. Hamster Kombat pushed that even further. These weren’t sophisticated DeFi protocols. They were games. Simple, addictive games that happened to run on a blockchain. And they onboarded more people than most “serious” projects ever will.
The lesson there is almost embarrassingly obvious. People don’t adopt technology because it’s technically impressive. They adopt it because it’s easy and there’s something in it for them. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.
Anyway, airdrops are just one piece of this. The quieter revolution — the one that doesn’t get enough credit — is stablecoins. Specifically USDT.
I’ve talked to freelancers in Southeast Asia who get paid entirely in USDT. Families in Africa sending money home without wiring fees eating up a quarter of the transfer. Small business owners in post-Soviet countries parking their savings in digital dollars because their local currency lost 30% in a year. None of these people would describe themselves as “crypto users.” They’d just say they use USDT. It’s a tool. It does a thing they need. The blockchain underneath is completely invisible to them, and that’s exactly how it should be.
This is what real adoption looks like, by the way. Not people trading memecoins on leverage at 3am. People using a crypto product because the traditional alternative is worse. Slower. More expensive. Less accessible. When a farmer in Nigeria chooses USDT over a bank transfer , that’s not speculation — that’s utility. And it’s happening at a scale most people in the West don’t fully appreciate.
Then there’s tokenized stocks, which I think is going to be the next big wave. The pitch is simple: take Apple or Tesla or NVIDIA shares, put them on a blockchain, and let anyone buy a fraction of one from anywhere in the world. For someone in Jakarta who wants $10 of exposure to the U.S. tech sector, this is transformative. Try opening a U.S. brokerage account from Indonesia. Good luck. Tokenization just sidesteps the entire gatekeeping apparatus of traditional finance.
It’s early. Liquidity is thin. Regulators are still figuring out how to feel about it. But BlackRock is already tokenizing funds. Franklin Templeton too. When those names show up, the direction is pretty clear.
The thing is, there’s this weird snobbery in crypto about gamified tools. I hear it all the time. “Tap-to-earn is a joke.” “Those users aren’t real.” “They’ll leave as soon as the rewards dry up.” And sure, some of them will. But some of them won’t. Some of them will look at their wallet, see they have tokens worth actual money, get curious, and start exploring. Maybe they swap one token for another. Maybe they stumble into stablecoins. Maybe they buy a fraction of a tokenized stock.
That’s how every technology adoption curve works. Nobody bought an iPhone to use enterprise software. They bought it to play Angry Birds and check Facebook. The serious use cases came later, once the device was already in people’s hands. Crypto’s “Angry Birds” moment is happening right now, and half the industry is too snobby to notice.
I remember when we were building DOGS, there were definitely people in the space who looked at what we were doing and dismissed it. Too simple. Too memey. Not “real” crypto. But then forty million users showed up. And a huge chunk of them created their first-ever crypto wallet to claim those tokens. You can call that unsophisticated if you want. I call it a forty-million-person on-ramp that didn’t exist before.
The whole adoption question has shifted. It’s not “will regular people use crypto” anymore. They already do. Millions of them. They just don’t always know they’re using crypto, and that’s actually fine. Great, even. You don’t think about TCP/IP when you load a website. You shouldn’t have to think about blockchain when you send someone money or earn a token in a game.
What the industry needs to do now is keep building these entry points and stop obsessing over whether new users are “serious enough.” Build the games. Build the stablecoin infrastructure. Build the tokenized everything. Make it so frictionless that people wander in without even realizing they’ve crossed a threshold.
Because that’s how mass adoption actually happens. Not with a manifesto. With a tap
