Chainalysis are pleased to share the fifth annual Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index.
In each year’s report, they look at both on- and off-chain data “to determine which countries are leading the world in grassroots crypto adoption.”
Chainalysis research highlights countries “where unique cryptocurrency use cases are taking hold, and explores why people in countries around the world are embracing crypto.”
The Global Crypto Adoption Index is “made up of four sub-indexes, each of which is based on countries’ usage of different types of cryptocurrency services.”
Chainalysis rank all 151 countries for which they “have sufficient data on each sub-index, weight the rankings by characteristics including population size and purchasing power, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all four, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1 to give every country a score that determines its overall ranking. The closer the country’s final score is to 1, the higher the rank.”
In order to calculate our sub-indexes, Chainalysis estimate countries’ transaction “volumes for different types of cryptocurrency services and protocols based on the web traffic patterns of those services’ and protocols’ websites.”
Chainalysis says that they “acknowledge that web traffic data are imperfect, as some crypto users likely employ VPNs and other similar tools to hide their true physical locations.”
However, given that their index “accounts for hundreds of millions of cryptocurrency transactions and more than 13 billion web visits, it is likely that any misattributed transaction volume due to VPNs is marginal, given the size of the dataset.”
Chainalysis also compare findings with insights “from local crypto experts and operators around the world, giving us more confidence in this methodology.”
Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) dominates their 2024 Index, “with seven of the top 20 countries located in the region.”
As they explore in the full report, CSAO has a unique set of crypto markets “with high levels of activity on local crypto exchanges, with merchant services, and in DeFi.”
Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, the total value of global crypto activity “increased substantially, reaching higher levels than those of 2021 during the crypto bull market.”
Chainalysis says that data confirms we can see this pattern in the analysis shared, where we apply their Adoption Index methodology globally “by adding all 151 countries’ index scores for each quarter from Q3 2021 to Q2 2024, and re-indexing them again to show global adoption growth over time.”
Last year, Chainalysis pointed out that “growth in crypto adoption was driven primarily by lower-middle income countries.”
This year, however, crypto activity increased “across countries of all income brackets, with a pullback in high income countries since the beginning of 2024.”
Chainalysis added that the launch of the Bitcoin ETF in the United States triggered “an increase in total value of Bitcoin activity across all regions, with particularly strong year-over-year growth in institutional-sized transfers and in regions with higher income countries, such as North America and Western Europe.”
On the contrary, year-over-year growth of stablecoins “was higher among retail and professional-sized transfers, and is supporting real-world use cases in low income and lower-middle income countries.”
