Amid the current hostile market, resulting in a significant crypto bear run, the number of crypto smartphone application downloads within Australia has fallen up to 80% over the past year.
According to data gathered from leading enterprise-grade market intelligence, Sensor Tower, downloads from the top 30 crypto apps have dropped by 72% in 2022, with the most popular and Australian-based, CoinSpot having nearly 80% fewer downlands from May of this year compared to May of 2021.
These apps enable you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies online, so, the fallen number in downloads are another measure of how to assess how unpopular cryptocurrencies have become over the course of the year.
The popularity of these apps are in direct correlation with the fall in the price of Bitcoin (BTC), amongst other cryptocurrencies, Sensor Tower’s regional director Eugene Du Plessis told The Australian.
“Crypto app downloads are fundamentally in lock-step with the value of Bitcoin, so any market fluctuation has a direct impact on consumer behaviour,” he explained.
The Crypto app Binance, saw a decrease in the number of downloads from 163,200 in May of 2021, to 41,400 downloads in May of 2022. Coinbase experienced 60,900 fewer downloads year on year. Other apps including, MetaMask, Swyftx, CoinJar and Kraken all suffered double digit percentage drops in downloads, according to Sensor Tower’s data.
Interestingly, Mr. Du Plessis believes that this significant decrease in app downloads is temporary, forecasting that Australia will be the fastest grower for cryptocurrency apps, with an expected market value of A$7bn by 2026.
However, currently, the massive drop in downloads have resulted in thousands of staff lay-offs.
After the initial plans to hire up to 2000 more employees for this year, stating, “enormous product opportunities ahead”, Coinbase, which has seen its share price drop by nearly 80% year-to-date, as introduced a hiring freeze and fired 18% of its work force.
Israeli multinational trading platform, eToro, announced that it would be laying off 100 employees- about 6% of its workforce, terminating their plans for a SPAC merger that would make the company public, according to David Swan, from The Australian.
Crypto.com, a major international exchange, also announced that it would be laying off 260 employees.
In public statements, these crypto apps have stated that these cutbacks are necessary measures needed to ride out the current economic conditions.
However, these ‘necessary measures’ have created some controversy.
In Mr. Swan’s article, Nigel Green, the chief executive of deVere Group, criticized crypto platforms for “making expensive TV ads and signing sports sponsorship deals amid widespread crypto industry lay-offs,” Mr. Swan writes.
“They went for enormously expensive TV ads, jumped on highest-tier sponsorships, rolled-out lending models offering astronomical interest rates on crypto deposits, and launched unprecedented hiring sprees,” Mr. Green says.
