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Crypto educator Dom Kwok (@dom_kwok, co-founder of the crypto-education platform EasyA) says the single question he gets asked more than any other on X is deceptively simple: will crypto's price grind upward slowly and predictably, or will it jump all at once? His answer, distilled into one widely shared chart, is unambiguous — it skyrockets at once, not gradually, because technology adoption doesn't move in a straight line. It follows what's known as an S-curve: a long, flat stretch where almost nothing visible happens, followed by a near-vertical climb once enough people are using the thing, followed by a plateau as the market approaches saturation. Dom's argument is that most people misjudge where crypto sits on that curve, and that misjudgment is exactly what produces both premature dismissal and premature euphoria.
New technology looks dead to almost everyone during its earliest stretch. Only a small slice of the population — the innovators and early adopters, typically enthusiasts, technologists, or people with an unusually high tolerance for risk and confusion — bother engaging with it at all. Dom draws the comparison to the early internet (dial-up modems, no meaningful e-commerce, most people had never sent an email) and early television (a novelty item in a handful of wealthy households for years before it became a fixture in every living room). His argument is that crypto is still living inside this exact phase today: real, functioning, but still confined mostly to a technically fluent minority rather than the mainstream.
At some point, enough people have adopted a technology that its growth stops depending on evangelists convincing skeptics one at a time, and instead becomes self-sustaining — new users show up because their friends, coworkers, or competitors are already using it, not because someone talked them into it. This is the inflection point, sometimes called the knee of the curve, and it's the moment a technology stops being a curiosity and starts becoming an expectation. Dom's framing treats this phase as the real turning point in the whole adoption story — more consequential, in his view, than either the flat beginning or the steep acceleration that follows it, because it's the phase where the outcome stops being genuinely uncertain.
Once critical mass is reached, network effects compound on themselves — each new user makes the technology marginally more useful and more socially expected for the next person, which pulls in still more users, in a feedback loop that can move very quickly. This is where Dom's actual investment argument lives: if the supply of an asset is fixed or grows slowly while demand is compounding exponentially through this feedback loop, price does not rise in a gentle, predictable staircase. It gaps — moving in sudden, discontinuous jumps as available supply gets absorbed faster than sellers are willing to part with it, which is a very different pattern from the smooth upward line most people picture when they imagine 'the market going up.'
An S-curve is a description of shape — how adoption compounds once it actually gets moving — not a calendar. It says nothing whatsoever about which specific year, or even which specific decade, the knee of the curve arrives in. Plenty of technologies have sat in the flat, early-adopter phase for a decade or more before inflecting, and some technologies that looked destined for mass adoption never made the turn at all. Treating the S-curve's shape as if it were also a timing model — 'the curve says this happens now' — is one of the most common misreadings of the whole argument, and it's a misreading Dom himself is careful to guard against in how he frames the chart.
Widespread internet adoption made the underlying protocol, TCP/IP, effectively ubiquitous — it's running invisibly under nearly everything digital today. But that ubiquity didn't make every company with a stock ticker in 1999 a winner; plenty of them, despite riding the same genuine wave of internet adoption, went to zero. 'People are adopting this technology at scale' and 'the specific asset I personally own will rise in value because of that adoption' are two separate claims, and the gap between them is exactly where a lot of investment reasoning quietly breaks down without anyone noticing the substitution happening.
Global crypto ownership reached 741 million people by the end of 2025 and 774 million by mid-2026, according to Crypto.com's Market Sizing reports — roughly 9 to 10 percent of the world's population. Measured against Rogers' diffusion-of-innovations model, a well-established framework in technology adoption research (innovators make up roughly the first 2.5% of eventual adopters, early adopters the next 13.5%, and the early majority the following 34%), that ownership level places crypto solidly inside early-adopter territory: past the stage where it plausibly 'looks dead' to a casual observer, but still meaningfully short of the early-majority stage where a technology becomes a mainstream default rather than a deliberate choice.
The historical comparison people reach for almost automatically is the internet circa 2000 to 2003 — the infrastructure already existed, institutions were beginning to arrive in earnest, but mass consumer habit hadn't yet become the unquestioned default it is today. That comparison is genuinely useful for illustrating what an early-adopter phase actually looks like from the inside, while it's still happening and the outcome still feels uncertain to the people living through it. But it's also easy to overfit: reaching for a comparison and then stopping there, without asking what's structurally different this time — different regulatory environment, different capital markets, different generation of users — turns a useful illustration into a substitute for actual analysis.
Dom Kwok's S-curve chart makes a real, defensible claim about how technology adoption compounds once critical mass is reached — but the claim is specifically about shape, not schedule, and about the technology broadly, not about any single token's price. Crypto's current ownership level, roughly 9 to 10 percent of the global population according to Crypto.com's own sizing data, places it in early-adopter territory on the standard Rogers diffusion model: solidly past the phase where the technology looks like a dead-end novelty, but still well short of the mass-market saturation that would make it a mainstream default rather than a deliberate choice. Reading the chart correctly means holding both halves of that at once, rather than collapsing it into either 'crypto is dead' or 'crypto is guaranteed to explode on schedule.'
Explain, in your own words, the difference between what Dom Kwok's S-curve argument actually claims and what it's often assumed to claim. Then explain why 741 million to 774 million crypto owners places the technology in 'early adopter' territory rather than 'early majority' territory on Rogers' diffusion model, and what would have to be true for that to change.
Reading a good explanation feels like understanding it. Usually it isn't the same thing — and you don't find out which one you've got until someone asks you to explain it back.