As of September 2022, the number of people holding cryptocurrencies is estimated to be just over 300 million people globally, which represents the equivalent of approximately 4% of the world’s population. However, according to a report recently published by Chainalysis, we observe that this adoption is not happening equally across the world.
A look back at the numbers for overall cryptocurrency adoption nationwide
For the second year in a row, Vietnam tops the rankings for cryptocurrency adoption. When looking at the nationwide crypto adoption ranking, it is possible to see that Vietnam shows high purchasing power and evenly distributed adoption between centralized or tethered crypto tools. Challenge.
Reports from local media have also suggested that the crypto-gaming industry sector, including games that use systems such as the Play-to-Earn (P2E) or Move to Earn (M2E), is particularly popular in Southeast Asia for both users and developers.
The most famous of the Play to Earn games being Axie Infinitya title of Vietnamese company Sky Mavis based in Ho Chi Minh City, which has been blessed with phenomenal success and record profits, inspiring a number of other startups to specialize in the sector crypto gaming.
Other sources have also noticed Vietnam’s interest in cryptocurrencies. A survey conducted in 2020 reports that almost 21% of Vietnamese surveyed said they own cryptocurrencies, thus placing themselves in second place in this ranking just after Nigeria with 32%.
Due to its oil resources, Nigeria is one of the first economic powers of the African continent, yet this wealth has a moderate impact on the standard of living of the population, which is in the average of other African countries. Thus the growing interest of the people of Nigeria in cryptos is mainly fueled by a number of failures of financial services in the country.
These are linked to a structural deficit as well as serious corruption problems. As a reminder, last May, the Comptroller General of Public Finances of Nigeria was arrested for his alleged involvement in a case of embezzlement of public funds of approximately 80 billion naira, the equivalent of 184 million euros.
As a result of the previously discussed issues, Nigerians have started using cryptos as a viable alternative for storing and transferring assets. According to a report by the Cointelegraph site published in April 2022, nearly 17.36 million, or 52% of Nigerian investors allocated more than half of their cryptocurrency assets.
Let us now study the particular case of the United States which arrives at the fifth place in the Chainalysis ranking for the year 2022 while they were in eighth position the previous year and sixth in 2020.
The country is still the leader in terms of portfolio value (with on average $18,000 of crypto per investor), nevertheless the latter is far behind on the question of the general interest of the population vis-à-vis the crypto sector.
And yet still according to the Chainalysis data, perhaps most interesting is the fact that the United States is by far the best-placed developed country in the ranking, it is even one of only two to be in the top 20 with the United Kingdom.
For its part, China has again entered the top 10 of this ranking after being placed in thirteenth position in 2021. Data from Chainalysis indicates that the use of services related to centralized cryptocurrencies is still relatively strong in China.
This is particularly interesting information considering that the Chinese government has openly cracked down on cryptocurrency-connected activity and has otherwise publicly declared crypto trading to be illegal since September 2021. It is therefore legitimate to think that this repression has not had much effect on users apart from those whose activities were related to the mining industry.
It should be noted that this legislative tightening is explained by the fact that the country launched its project of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency or central bank digital currency in French) with its e-yuan. First initiated at the beginning of 2014 before being truly tested in some of the country’s cities in 2020, today the digital Yuan is used by more than 261 million people on a regular basis as part of various digital payments.
