Have you ever wondered how many countries are adopting cryptocurrency and how much is crypto ‘taking over the world’? To give you the answer, we’re running a series of articles to uncover the truth. To have a solid foundation we picked up a Chainalysis report on this topic. Now, let’s dive into it.
Crypto Adoption Soaring 880% In 12 Months
The report digs into the data from July 2020 until June 2021. We’ve seen worldwide crypto adoption exploding and growing by 9 times. To give you a balanced view Chainalysis is looking at 3 metrics:
- On-chain cryptocurrency value received by country divided by GDP per capita. This lets us know the total amount of crypto a certain country received. Then, it’s weighted against the relative wealth of each citizen (measured in GDP per capita).
- On-chain retail value received, weighted by GDP per capita. This metric shows how much crypto trades between average people because it only shows transactions under $10,000. Thus it’s not skewed by professional and institutional transactions. Then it’s weighted against the relative wealth of each citizen.
- Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange trade volume, weighted by GDP per capita and number of internet users. Again, we’re looking at transactions between average users and weighting it in favor of countries with lower GDP per capita and fewer internet users.
North America Is the 2nd Largest Crypto Economy
Having received an astonishing $750 billion in cryptocurrency between July 2020 and June 2021, North America is one of the biggest places for crypto. Chainalysis says this accounts for 18.4% of all global activity with the USA taking the biggest chunk of it.
USA Is First In DeFi Adoption Index
DeFi played a huge role for a very strong growth in this region. Just to give you a feeling of how massive the growth in CEX and DeFi is, just check out the following graph. You can see that until May 2020 DeFi was literally non-existent and then it soared to the height of $75 billion in May 2021. And that’s just in 12 months!
The other intriguing fact is that the USA is leading in both big-ticket DeFi transactions made by professionals and institutions, as well as in retail-sized DeFi transactions (below $10,000). This makes it one of the most developed DeFi markets in the world, according to the Chainalysis report.
This of course led to a massive growth of crypto platforms in the USA with Uniswap as the most popular, followed by Coinbase, dYdX.exchange, Gemini.com, Compound, and Binance.
Source: Chainalysis Report
As we can see in the top 5 we have:
- Uniswap who is a DEX
- dYdX that focuses on derivatives trading
- and Compound that’s doing interest-based lending.
North American users take advantage of all the investment potential in DeFi. And it’s not just a simple use case of investing with a DEX. This represents a sign of a very mature market growing very fast.
Let’s wrap it up with what Growth Lead David Gogel at dYdX thinks about DeFi’s explosive growth over 12 months: “Right now, DeFi is targeted towards crypto insiders. It’s people who have been in the industry for a while and have enough funds to experiment with new assets. United States specifically, along with China, Russia, and several others in Western Europe as those leading the way in the DeFi category.”
Give Us Your Money Or We Will Delete Your Data
Imagine that you wake up one morning, open your computer and you cannot access ANY of your files. Yes. We’re speaking about ransomware here. And North America was the biggest target. Cybercriminals raked in more than $131 million in 1 year. Forget about bank heists in the 1930s. These are bank heists that people do from the comfort of their own homes. And unfortunately, motivation is big. Luckily there’s some good news that police were able to track down some of them and bring them to justice. But apart from scams that took most of the money, rising ransomware attacks are something to look out for.
Conclusion
Overall, the North American markets see most everything crypto has to offer. That includes many investment options but also includes scams. Combine this with many of the best project teams based here and North America is one of the biggest, most influential markets in crypto.
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