According to recent data from Chainlysis, the adoption of cryptocurrencies has exploded worldwide in the past year, rising by an impressive 881%, with Vietnam, India, and Pakistan firmly in the lead. The Global Crypto Adoption Index, which ranks 154 countries based on metrics like peer-to-peer exchange trading volume rather than gross transaction volume, which typically favours developed countries with high levels of professional and institutional crypto buy-in, has been published by the blockchain data firm for the second year.
“Geography of Cryptocurrency,” the company’s 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index, compared the countries’ adoption of cryptocurrencies based on three key factors: on-chain retail value transferred, on-chain cryptocurrency value received, and peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange trade volume between June 2020 and June 2021. The index ranked 154 countries by taking the geometric mean of three indicators, then normalized that result on a scale of 0 to 1 to give each country a score that determines the overall rankings. The higher the rank, the nearer the ultimate score is to 1.
Chainalysis attributes a few crucial drivers to the increased adoption levels in emerging regions. For starters, when accounting for buying power parity per capita and the proportion of the population that uses the internet, nations like Kenya, Nigeria, Vietnam, and Venezuela have enormous transaction volumes on peer-to-peer, or P2P, platforms. According to Chainalysis, many locals use P2P cryptocurrency exchanges as their main entry point into the currency, frequently because to a lack of access to centralized exchanges. According to the survey, many citizens in these nations use cryptocurrencies to send and receive remittances, conduct business, and save their money in the face of currency devaluation.
P2P platforms are more popular in Central and Southern Asia, Latin America, and Africa than in regions with developed economies, including Western Europe and Eastern Asia. People buy cryptocurrencies on P2P platforms to protect their investments as a result of the significant currency devaluation that is occurring in many emerging economies. In these areas, it is also typical to conduct international transactions for remittances from one person to another or for business purposes, such as buying items to import and sell. Residents are only permitted to transfer a certain amount of the local currency outside of the nation. Even though China and the US were fourth and sixth respectively on the index from the previous year, their positions dropped.
However, there are numerous reported incidents of businesses added to the database who later stop accepting bitcoins after months or years of low demand, so the total stock of merchants registered on CoinMap may not be an absolutely true depiction of the reality in that year. Due to this, we decide to concentrate on the database’s annual inflow. Thus, the number of new bitcoin-accepting businesses in any given year in a country, or sub-country state, province, or area, is our major dependent variable built from this database. Because merchants are not deleted from our database when they are removed from the map by users or the website administrator, our dataset is not subject to the problem of survival bias.
Our dataset is restricted to Full Bitcoin nodes and merchants that are not hidden. As a subset of Full Bitcoin nodes that can be reached, Bitnodes maintain the network’s security because some nodes simply refuse incoming connections, primarily as a result of the installation of firewalls. Some estimates suggest that the network contains up to 6–8 times as many nodes as what is shown in our data. Similarly, businesses who exclusively sell online or hide their presence from CoinMap are not considered to be Bitcoin merchants. As a result, the focus of our research is on companies who offer digital infrastructure and actively promote the Bitcoin network.
Many governments’ regulators have struggled to track the development of cryptocurrencies. The adoption of cryptocurrencies is being hampered by unclear legislation. Some people think that cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and have only sentimental support. Some of the notable nations that have put restrictions on the use and the exchange of cryptocurrencies include China and Egypt. Clear regulations, according to experts, are likely to promote the adoption of cryptocurrencies. It’s likely that fresh and inventive derivative products will appear.