The bloom of crypto assets by numbers

Cryptocurrency counts by year

I tried to find out a good metrics to understand how many crypto assets are being added to the blockchain ecosystem and wasn’t able to find a good metrics. Although there are various coin tracking sites to see the current number of tokens, getting the number of tokens by year is a difficult job.

One of the major source of crypto currency tracking is CoinMarketCap, even they fail to provide analytics on the assets per year. They do have some global charts on other areas, assets being tracked per year is not available. So I had look for some alternate ways to deduce the metrics.

One of them was to use the historical snapshots data from CoinMarketCap. They have been tracking crypto assets since 2013. They provide a historical snapshot here.

So I went ahead and looked at the first snapshot of the year each year from that historical data and here is what I came up with as a more credible digital asset counts per year. These are tracked assets. CoinMarketCap has a lot of unlisted tracking due to the poor quality of those projects and apparently their snapshot did not include those assets.

So, without further due, here is the year by year data. The count shows the number of cryptocurrencies at the start of the year. The graph above and the data below is apparent that we are getting to a parabolic shift right now.

Tabular view of Digital Assets by Year

Year	Tracked Crypto Assets at Year Start
2013	7
2014	67
2015	501
2016	572
2017	636
2018	1359
2019	2086
2020	2403
2021	4154
2022	8648

Like I mentioned above, this data only used the tracked listing. However, including all unlisted tracking, CoinMarketCap has over 16000 digital assets in their list.

The data is very rough and incomplete due to following reasons but does help us to understand the growth pattern.

• Many tokens are not listed on CoinMarketCap
• There are projects that have launched but choose not to be listed.
• The tokens might have been listed elsewhere.
• The tokens might have been listed in some geographical boundaries.

As web3 evolves, more and more websites, services and interactions are going to be based on tokenization. My prediction is that by year 2030, there might be over a million digital assets in circulation and thousands of blockchains, if not more.