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Threads just crossed 500 million monthly active users. Meta announced the milestone on Tuesday, cementing the platform’s status as the fastest-growing challenger in the text-based social media space.
The number is impressive on its own. It’s even more impressive when you consider Threads launched less than three years ago, on July 5, 2023, and initially looked like it might be another flash-in-the-pan Meta experiment.
From zero to half a billion
Threads’ growth trajectory has been nothing short of aggressive. The app hit 100 million users within its first five days of existence, a pace that outstripped even ChatGPT’s viral debut. By April 2024, monthly active users had climbed to 150 million. By October 2024, that figure had nearly doubled to 275 million.
The momentum kept building. Threads reached 400 million monthly active users by the third quarter of 2025 before arriving at the 500 million mark now.
Daily active users tell a similarly compelling story, with approximately 150 million people opening the app on any given day. Meta says those daily numbers continue to “increase strongly across the globe.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set his sights even higher. He’s publicly stated he believes Threads can reach 1 billion users.
The company attributes much of this surge to communities, a feature that allows users to congregate around specific topics. Meta is bringing communities out of beta and adding new features, including a dedicated communities hub in the Threads menu. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has pointed to community-driven growth as the platform’s core strategy going forward.
The X factor
Threads has managed to either close the gap with or, in some daily usage metrics, outperform X. The Instagram integration has been a significant advantage. New users can port their existing Instagram following to Threads with minimal friction, eliminating the cold-start problem that kills most new social networks.
Meta has also explored integration with ActivityPub, the decentralized social protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated platforms. ActivityPub federation would, in theory, allow Threads users to interact with content across the broader “fediverse,” a collection of interconnected but independently operated social platforms. Meta hasn’t made any dramatic moves toward full federation, and the current implementation is limited.
What crypto investors should know
For a company that once tried to launch its own stablecoin, Meta has been remarkably quiet on the crypto front with Threads. There are no blockchain integrations, no token launches, and no NFT features baked into the platform.
Meta’s abandoned Libra project (later renamed Diem) was supposed to be the company’s grand entrance into digital finance. That initiative collapsed under regulatory pressure in 2022, and Meta has shown little appetite to revisit anything crypto-adjacent since.
Right now, the primary interaction between Threads and crypto is unfortunately limited to scam accounts impersonating prominent crypto figures.
Meta has been deliberate about not overloading Threads with advertising early on, prioritizing user growth over short-term revenue extraction. For crypto-native social platforms like Farcaster, Lens Protocol, and others building decentralized alternatives, Threads’ growth makes the hill they need to climb considerably steeper.
The ActivityPub angle remains the most crypto-relevant thread to watch. If Meta eventually commits to meaningful federation, it could create a bridge between the centralized social graph that 500 million people already use and the decentralized protocols that Web3 builders have spent years constructing.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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