The best we can do are surveys. According to this one[0], there are around 34 million Americans that have a cryptocurrency wallet. I suppose the world wide number of users is a lot higher.
[0] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/us-adults-crypt...
The simple observation that one runs* into the same several dozen people over, and over, and over again at every crypto congregation whether online or in person, should be a strong indication that this is an extremely inbred space and the sock puppetry amplification from principal to agent is conservatively inflating usage metrics by a factor of 100 if not more.
* edit: okay this is somewhat dated information, maybe today it's a couple hundred instead of several dozen.
One of these whales has a bot farm sybiling every protocol imaginable 24x7. Got an Arbitrum airdrop of over 1,000,000 tokens across more than 800 wallets.
I have about 10 addresses in my main Metamask account, and I have iirc 4-5 Metamask accounts, each with minimum 2-3 addresses.
Indeed, on-chain address data is more or less useless for counting users, I mentioned this in my comments. The survey I shared wasn't based on on-chain data.
Anyone who has ever created an account on a crypto exchange has a crypto address. I have accounts at Binance, WazirX, Kraken, Crypto.com, Gate.io, Mexc, ByBit, and probably 2-3 more exchanges I can't remember. That means I have 10+ addresses.
But that's not real users. Any money I've sent to exchanges is just for trading/investing. I'm not actually using the tech.
On-chain usage is the only real usage. The rest is just banking with more hurdles and scams.
I mostly just buy crypto once a month and every once in awhile make a purchase with it when it makes sense (usually either towards a new computer or some place I don't want getting my credit card info).
If crypto became the default (which I'd be fine with), I'd use it all the time. But there's enough fees converting from USD to crypto and then making a purchase on top of that, as well as hassle with taxes each year (since I do report crypto transactions on my taxes) that trying to use it for all transactions, currently, isn't worth it for me.
So on most days I wouldn't even show up in that 80,000 DAU (well, especially since I don't touch USDT at all, keep in mind there's quite a few coins out there, not everyone interacts with all, or even more than a few of them).
And yet I keep up with crypto news, read crypto forums, watch videos about crypto, on an almost daily basis. Personally, I'd consider myself a user of crypto, and find it to be a useful tool. But just like my drill or my hammer, I don't use it every single day, just when the situation calls for it.
I think we're in agreement here? On-chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users. That's why I was sharing survey data, which is the best approximation we can get.
For actual users using the tech, it's also difficult to know but we can see that the on-chain transaction volume is quite significant (multi billion dollar daily).
