Buying and trading cryptoassets has become a truly global phenomenon.
What started out at the beginning of the decade as a few tech hobbyists mining bitcoin has exploded into an international industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, with traders around the world exchanging cryptoassets and unlike traditional exchanges like NASDAQ or NYSE they are open for business all day, every day.
But where is the action happening?
At DataLight our analysts created this visualization showing the geographical distribution of crypto traders across the world.
Using website traffic data* from the 100 most popular crypto exchanges, the infographic shows which countries are actively trading and buying cryptoassets.
Leaders
As expected**, the USA leads the way in crypto trading by a long distance. With over 22 million monthly visits, the USA remains by far the most active crypto trading country.
In second and third, with similar traffic levels are Japan and South Korea. As both countries are famously enamored of cryptocurrencies and the crypto ecosystem, it’s again unsurprising that these two Asian nations are still heavily involved in crypto trading. Last year the ‘kimchi premium’ surged to 50% in the grips of the bull market meaning that South Koreans were paying 50% more for their bitcoin than the US markets!
The UK also is seeing impressive crypto trading traffic, with nearly 4 million monthly visits to exchanges. With London emerging as a major European crypto hub, it’s likely that this number will grow.
Volatile Currencies: Countries that Can’t Get Enough of Crypto
In a very different way, some other countries are embracing cryptoassets in a big way. Three standout countries which may be considerably higher up the list than you might have thought are Turkey, Ukraine and Mexico.
The common denominator between these three countries is volatile currencies.
Turkey for example, has in the last year seen wild fluctuations in the value of the Turkish Lira, as turbulent political conditions rock the country. Interestingly, on one day in August 2018, a 10% drop in the value of the Lira was accompanied by a marked spike in volumes on bitcoin exchange LocalBitcoins.
This dynamic also likely explains the surprisingly high traffic in Ukraine and Mexico as citizens unsure about the stability of their fiat currencies look for alternative means of storing their value.
Crypto Covering the world
Perhaps the most obvious and remarkable feature from the infographic is simply how much of the world is actually trading in cryptoassets: nearly every country on the globe is seeing some trading traffic, with the exception of Greenland and parts of central Africa. However, efforts from Binance may introduce cryptocurrencies to central Africa as they launched Binance Uganda in October 2018.
* Data is taken from SemRush analytics platform.
** Data is counted on ip addresses. So chinese and other traders that use VPN are out of calculation.
The DataLight Laboratory
Using the DataLight Lab you can gain tons of insights. From social sentiment data to blockchain analytics you can create custom dashboards to track the most important indicator in crypto.
Default dashboard is the best to get you started as it shows you the state of the market, useful social stats and blockchain activity at one glance. If you are a bitcoin maximalist then you can just focus in on bitcoin-specific stats. Head over to the DataLight Lab and start creating your own dashboards.
Originally published at https://datalight.me on April 29, 2019.
