Introducing Cost Per Wallet (CPW)
The crypto industry lacks a fundamental metric for user acquisition and growth. Traditional sectors have clear customer acquisition benchmarks, but crypto marketers struggle to quantify success due to pseudonymous users, fragmented ecosystems, and unclear conversion paths. Without a standard metric, it’s difficult to compare strategies, optimize spend, or justify budgets.
To bridge this gap, I’m proposing Cost Per Wallet (CPW)—a metric designed specifically for crypto growth that measures the cost of acquiring a wallet-ready user, providing a clear, actionable way to track marketing effectiveness and drive real adoption.
The Case for CPW
One of the most exciting aspects of marketing is the blend of creativity and data. Yet, in crypto, the numbers are often elusive. Reading through crypto growth newsletters, community tweets, and TG chats, I keep asking: “Where are the numbers?”
At Addressable, we’ve run campaigns for 100+ clients—some of the biggest blockchains, exchanges, and wallets—and yet, finding a simple, universal metric to gauge success is like finding Satoshi himself. How do we compare to competitors? What’s a good benchmark? Are we winning? And most importantly, by how much?
The Challenge with Existing Metrics
Traditional Web2 metrics like CAC and CPC don’t translate well to crypto because they rely on assumptions that don’t fit the space.
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) assumes a clear conversion event, but in crypto, that event often happens off-site—on an exchange, a DEX, or even on-chain. Additionally, users interact across multiple wallets, making direct attribution challenging.
- CPC (Cost Per Click) assumes clicks equal attention, but in Web3, view-through engagement from KOLs or banner ads is often more influential. Worse, clicks don’t guarantee adoption—they could come from bots, airdrop farmers, or casual visitors who immediately bounce.
That’s why Web3-native metrics like Cost Per Value (CPV) [1] and Mindshare [2] are so important.
CPV by Spindl is a multi-touch attribution model designed for projects with on-chain revenue—but many crypto startups today are still in the discovery phase or generate off-chain revenue, making it difficult to apply CPV at scale.
Mindshare by Kaito.ai effectively tracks attention on Crypto Twitter and its correlation with token prices, but it doesn’t measure attribution (which campaign actually moved the needle?) or cost tracking (how much does it cost to get mindshare?).
Rather than replacing CPV or Mindshare, CPW complements them by bridging the gap between attention and adoption. Every growth funnel, and in particular for crypto, follows the same path:
👉 Attention → Engagement → Adoption → Conversion
- Mindshare deals with attention.
- CPW measures the transition from attention to engagement and towards adoption.
- CPV measures conversions—but conversions are rare today or often happen off-site.
By introducing CPW, we make it possible to quantify and optimize the middle of the funnel, giving growth teams a practical, scalable way to measure their success before revenue materializes on-chain.
The CPW Solution: A Simple, No-BS Metric
Most crypto projects drive traffic to web landing pages—it’s the lowest-friction option. With mobile apps tangled in regulatory red tape and Telegram mini-apps being a tracking nightmare, the web remains king.
And what’s the most reliable way to identify a real crypto user? A wallet installed on their browser.
Enter CPW: The cost of acquiring a website visitor who has a browser wallet installed. It’s the anti-bot, anti-boomer, pro-crypto metric we’ve been missing.
Evaluating CPW - Why Would This Work?
Over the recent months, we analyzed 245 campaigns managed on the Addressable platform across X Ads and Programmatic. These campaigns targeted users in 195 countries, capturing data from 439,000 website visitors on crypto-related sites — a fair size sample to analyze. The results? Wallet owners identified by CPW are:
- 7.4x more likely to engage (stay on-site for over 30 seconds instead of bouncing).
- 18x more likely to log in via Wallet Connect or a CEX.
- 7x more likely to convert by completing a first transaction.
Even compared to already engaged visitors, as a possible alternative metric, wallet ownership is linked to a 2x higher login rate and a 16% higher conversion rate.
These results establish CPW as a powerful indicator of acquisition performance and a measure to optimize growth based on real crypto user behavior.
What Channels Get Attributed with CPW?
The attribution model for crediting CPW to a source is a matter of preference, but for those looking to implement it effectively, I’d personally lean toward first-touch attribution. Why?
First-touch attribution captures discovery—the moment users first hear about a token and decide to learn more. This is arguably the most critical insight for growth teams, as it identifies which channels actually generate new wallet-ready users, rather than just nurturing or capturing them later in the funnel.
Additionally, Occam’s Razor applies—the simplest solution is often the best. Multi-touch attribution is ideal in theory but impractical for bootstrapped crypto startups, while last-touch attribution is misleading, often over-crediting Google as a navigational tool rather than a true discovery source. First-touch is not necessarily the most insightful, but it’s certainly the most straightforward, scalable, and actionable approach for Web3 growth teams.
Early Results: The Good, The Bad, and the Surprisingly Cheap
Tracking CPW over the past two months has revealed juicy early numbers:
- Meme tokens with programmatic ads → Dogecoin20: $1.48 CPW (degenerates are cheap to acquire!) [3]
- Developer CTF with Reddit Ads → $0.36 CPW (absolute steal—Reddit ads are still underpriced!) [4]
- DEX marketing on Twitter Ads → $3.07 CPW (wallets still showed up even after the campaign ended—momentum is real!) [5]
It’s important to note that CPW is highly influenced by audience, geography, creatives, messaging, and market timing. For example, acquiring a trader in North America ($3–$5 CPW) is significantly more expensive than a meme token degen in other parts of the world. These insights allow teams to optimize budget allocation based on acquisition goals.
I’ll be sharing more results in the future, and I invite others to do the same. By using this one simple metric, we can make discussions more comparable, data-driven, and actionable, helping the entire crypto community refine and optimize growth strategies together.
Future Work: Expanding CPW with WTR and Benchmarks
The next step is refining how we assess wallet quality and channel effectiveness.
One promising direction is Wallet-Through-Rate (WTR)—the percentage of wallet owners coming through a specific channel.
Beyond WTR, benchmarking CPW across variables will provide deeper insights into:
- Channels (X ads, influencers, programmatic, community referrals)
- Regions (cost variations by geography)
- Audience types (devs, traders, whales, DeFi users, NFT collectors)
Ultimately, CPW isn’t just about lowering costs—it’s about acquiring high-value users who engage, transact, and contribute to the ecosystem.
What’s Next for CPW?
If crypto is going to grow the right way, it needs clear, measurable standards—starting with tracking real engagement and steps towards adoption; not just attention.
Version 1 of CPW is a first step toward a simple, practical metric that helps teams quantify growth and make marketing more data-driven. It’s not about replacing other frameworks but about filling a critical gap in understanding the transition from interest to adoption. Refining CPW will require community input, so I welcome all feedback—even the harshest critiques.
The best way forward is through collaboration and iteration. I’ll continue sharing insights as we learn, but ultimately, this is about moving crypto from guesswork to real, measurable growth—one wallet at a time.
Sources:
[1] https://blog.spindl.xyz/p/cost-per-value-cpv-a-new-media-business
[2] Kaito.ai
[3] https://www.addressable.io/case-study/memecoins
[4] https://x.com/AsafNadler/status/1882057858822684730
[5] https://x.com/AsafNadler/status/1886022593439735983
