Global crypto adoption
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Chainalysis has been publishing its global cryptocurrency adoption index for five years now, with the most recent installment dropping yesterday.
What jumps out is that the five highest-ranked countries have changed quite a bit from year to year.
By the numbers: India has been No. 1 for the last two years (despite being very harsh on the industry), but it didn't even make the top 10 in 2020.
- Vietnam was No. 1 the two years before India took the lead, but now it's fifth, behind the U.S.
- (Yet research by Kyros Ventures shows people in Vietnam and neighboring countries to be avid users of all sorts of crypto products.)
- One of the biggest movers this year was Indonesia, which jumped from seventh place to third. Chainalysis said the country has received $157 billion in cryptocurrency.
The intrigue: While the list has changed over the last five years, so has the methodology, as the company refined the ways it looked at the question and new activities became popular online.
The big picture: From its inception, cryptocurrency has attempted to evade easy surveillance. And even the market leaders in crypto surveillance have struggled to define the best way to compare blockchain activity from country to country.
- So looking across the company's five successive efforts to quantify and compare the on-chain activity of the citizenry in different nations is also something of a recent history of the industry in and of itself.
The biggest change: decentralized finance (DeFi). In the first report, DeFi is not one of the metrics, even though that was DeFi's breakout year.
- In 2022, DeFi became a key part of the metrics. Chainalysis also had to calibrate for the ways that DeFi tends to become a bit of a turducken of investments within investments.
- Also, lately, it has struck a balance between professional volume and that of normal people by attempting to distinguish between them in separate metrics.
The latest: Chainalysis has already seen levels of activity in 2024 higher than the highest highs in the last boom.
- If that feels wrong to you, that's because activity in high-income countries did drop off. It's just that it increased in the rest of the world, Chainalysis shows.
