• Argentina is the world’s most crypto-friendly country 
• America ranks second for crypto adoption 
• The United Arab Emirates, with the most crypto holders, ranks third 

Cryptocurrencies have been rising in popularity in recent years, with crypto ownership growing from 432 million to 580 million in 2023 alone, according to Crypto.com.

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While many countries have tried to regulate and suppress the technological advances, others have accepted and supported the growth of these new industries.

Argentina topped the list as the world’s most crypto-friendly country, with a large percentage of the population holding crypto and offering some of the best conditions for miners and traders alike.

Research by crypto experts at CryptoCasinos analysed 10 metrics to determine which countries across the globe have adopted crypto more so than any others, making them the most crypto-friendly nations.

The metrics chosen are the percentage of the population holding cryptocurrency, the cost and profit of mining one bitcoin, and search volume per 100,000 population for crypto-related keywords.

The data also includes the percentage share of each country’s traffic to each of the major crypto exchanges Binance, Coinbase, BitFinex, Kraken, Kucoin and OKX.

Countries with the highest rates of crypto adoption  

Argentina is the most crypto-friendly country. One in ten (9.7%) of the country’s population holds cryptocurrency, over triple the global average of 3%.

The low energy costs make it a perfect place to mine Bitcoin, costing an estimated $14,647 to mine 1 Bitcoin, meaning a profit of $51,261 (based on a BTC price of $65,908). Argentina also has one of the highest amounts of traffic (6.3%) to Binance (the world’s largest crypto exchange).

America has a high percentage of the population holding a cryptocurrency, with 15.6%. However, higher average energy costs mean it costs more to mine Bitcoin in certain parts of the States ($87,885).

Americans visited Coinbase over 48 million times in March, making up 59% of the website traffic. The US also made up 23.3% of the traffic to Kraken, showing the US is actively embracing crypto and investing through these exchanges.

Colombia ranks third for crypto adoption; the rise in blockchain activity is partly due to the depreciation of the Colombian Peso over the past few years (as reported by Bloomberg in 2022); crypto offers wealth protection from depreciating currencies.

Five per cent (5%) of the population holds crypto, and Colombians make up 5.8% of the global web traffic for the largest exchanges, which is on par with many of the other countries in this list.

Ukraine is the fourth most crypto-friendly state. Over 10% of the population holds cryptocurrency, and mining costs are particularly cheap, averaging around $19,530 per bitcoin.

Based on the price previously stated, this would mean the profit would be $46,378.  Ukraine also makes up 4.8% of the web traffic to Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

The United Arab Emirates ranks fifth for crypto adoption worldwide, with the largest percentage of the population holding crypto at 30.4% (The average across all countries is 3%), only Vietnam comes close with 21%.

Search volume for crypto-related terms is also the highest with 1,415 searches per 100,000 of the population.

The UAE has been fostering a robust and flexible ecosystem to attract business and drive forward technological innovation, making the nation a frontrunner in digital adoption, as reported by Forbes in 2023.

Vietnam, ranking sixth, has continued to witness its economy becoming more digitised in the last decade, becoming one of the world’s most crypto-adopted nations and is currently Asia’s most crypto-friendly country.

Twenty million (21.2%) of the population hold cryptocurrencies. Vietnam drives 4.9% of the web traffic to crypto exchange OKX and 6.3% to Binance.

Turkey ranks seventh for crypto adoption, which could be since the Turkish lira has, at times, proven to be more volatile than bitcoin. Turkey’s inflation rate surpassed 83% in 2022 and is around 67% currently.

Due to this, over 4.8 million (5.6%) of the population choose to hold crypto.

Turkey makes up 6.6% of the web traffic to Binance, and mining operations may be slightly cheaper, with an average cost of $39,060 per Bitcoin.

Canada is eighth in this ranking for crypto adoption. 7% of the nation currently hold crypto, and there are 1,204 searches for crypto-related keywords every month per 100,000 of the population.

Canada is also responsible for 8.4% of website traffic to Kraken.

Singapore ranks ninth for crypto adoption. Having earned a reputation as one of the key financial centres in the world, it is unsurprising that Singapore has begun to establish itself as a global cryptocurrency hotspot.

[Featured Image by Kanchanara: Credit]

In this interview, Gracy Chen explains the value this offers Bitget, and other sundry issues. Excerpt:

Hi Gracy, good to have you here. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and when did you join Bitget?

Formerly, I was an anchor and producer at the technology and finance channel of Phoenix TV, one of the largest Asian media conglomerates. That’s also around the time that some of my friends (who are famous crypto entrepreneurs and investors today such as He Yi, co-founder of Binance, and Tim Draper, whom I studied from when I was at Draper University) introduced me to the crypto industry. In 2014, I started to invest in cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH, and XRP, not in huge amounts.

I think people should build portfolios with small percentage investment in crypto according to their own experience and risk-tolerance level. And it’s only since 2017, that I started to invest more in the primary and secondary crypto market. For example, I‘ve been an investor in the early days of BitKeep, Asia’s leading decentralized wallet and Bitget’s sister company.

So in this journey, I have witnessed the brand’s development and growth throughout the years. Hence, I decided to join Bitget in 2022, changing the role from an investor to a builder.

Can you tell us about the recent Bitget investment of $30 million in BitKeep?

The investment is beneficial for both Bitget and BitKeep as they collaborate to connect DeFi and CeFi, leveraging their respective strengths. The integration of BitKeep Wallet with Bitget’s business domain will enhance the exchange’s product offering and expand its business into the wallet sector, providing native storage and asset management services.

Furthermore, BitKeep’s substantial user base of over 8 million in 168 countries will enable Bitget to tap into a new pool of potential clients.

Additionally, BitKeep’s impressive range of services, including access to diverse DeFi protocols and NFT projects across various blockchains, will allow Bitget to transform from a prominent derivative exchange into a comprehensive and holistic exchange with a growing ecosystem, thus delving deeper into the Web3 space.

We have seen you giving speeches in different events talking about Bitget flagship product copy trading. Can you tell us more about Social Trading and how Bitget is helping its users with this innovative product? Do you follow any traders on the platform, any tips you want to share?

With the vision to increase financial independence, we focus on transforming the way people connect and trade with social trading. We believe in the power of social trading and make it our quintessential feature, allowing us to differentiate among exchanges such as Binance and OKX, offering users valuable services.

High barriers to crypto investment hinder its mass adoption. Copy trading with more social interactions will be the key. Launched in May 2020, Bitget is the first crypto exchange to introduce copy trading features. It now supports copy trading in the spot market, futures market, and copy a strategist.

Since its launch, the copy trading feature on Bitget has attracted more than 80,000 elite traders to share their strategies and more than 380,000 followers to copy, making it the largest crypto copy trading platform.

As of Jan 2023, the number of profitable trades through Bitget copy trading is over 47 million, with gains from profitable trades reaching 300 million, and profits shared by elite traders reaching USD 20 million.

“Bitget Insights”, is a new feature on our platform, which makes social trading more accessible to everyone. The feature is acting as a mixture of “social media + trading”, and its curated “lead traders” can post their chart analysis, technical strategies, and articles, to share their insights with followers and help them make smarter financial decisions.

As of Jan 2023, over 500 trading experts are sharing their crypto market insights on the platform with nearly 10,000 posts generated.

In the future, we will continue to bring innovative products and services, providing more trading strategies and skills for our users and helping beginners to learn more about the industry.

Changing topic, in this period it is inevitable to talk about the banking crisis. How do you see this impacting the crypto industry? What would you suggest to all our readers considering that there might be more banks on the verge of collapse?

I think there will be inevitable development in the space after this wave of bank closures. We are living in an increasingly multipolar, interconnected and multicultural world. Since the 1980s, financial institutions and financial markets have no longer been operating within an enclosed geographical space. Instead, we are trading in a global and highly networked business arena. In this financial context, it is not realistic to think that we can continue to rely on siloed and immutable financial systems.

We need flexible, elevated open-source algorithms, time-efficient financial structures that cut settlement times as well as costs, and transactions that are not only frictionless but also borderless.

Digital currencies offer exactly that. So, cryptocurrencies and crypto exchanges have been portrayed as an alternative to traditional banking, but actually we are expanding the financial offerings with the more advanced ecosystem. Most of the traditional banking businesses, such as loans, mortgage and credit cards etc, will still need banks to perform, and crypto exchanges can provide some innovative financial services with its infrastructure.

Bitget did great in 2022 while the market and several crypto companies were collapsing. What’s the secret sauce you have been using to grow rapidly and fast?

The year 2022 was one of the roughest in the crypto industry. The collapse of Terra LUNA, Celsius, and FTX, consequently wiping out over US$2 trillion from the crypto market. Despite the hardships in the market, Bitget grew in all aspects;  the company made great strides in building our team, brand, and business over the last 12 months during the crypto winter.

Some key development areas of the company included:

1. Climbing the chart ranked as the Top 3 exchange according to the Boston Consulting Group report, in terms of crypto derivative trading volume.
2. According to the latest TokenInsight report, Bitget’s market share in the derivative market increased from 3% to 11% after the collapse of FTX
3. Over 300% increase in total transaction volume, with the popularity of copy trading products
4. The workforce grew from barely 200 people at the beginning of 2022 to over 1300 employees now
5. Became the exclusive crypto exchange partner with Lionel Messi

Bitget is the first and largest crypto copy trading platform, connecting beginners with professional traders. Launched in May 2020, Bitget now supports copy trading in the spot market, futures market, and copy a strategist. Since its launch, the copy trading feature on Bitget has attracted more than 80,000 elite traders to share their strategies and more than 380,000 followers to copy.

These figures of growth attribute to our endeavors on not only service improvement and product innovation, but also the global expansion and adoption of top-notch security and protection measures.  Previously, the company focused on serving customers from a few Asian countries alone. However, by the end of 2022, the exchange had acquired over 8 million users in more than 100 countries, with footprints in Turkey, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Bitget is safeguarding users’ funds on the platform with a series of security policies, including a $300 million Protection Fund, a Fund Custody service, pledged to be fully reserved back by the Merkle Tree Proof of Reserves model.

Can you tell us more about funds security at Bitget? Do you provide any audits?

In Bitget, securing users’ assets on our platform has been our top priority since day one, and we have taken plenty of measures on this end. The first response we have done with FTX’s collapse is to launch a US $5 million builders’ fund to assist affected partners, and increased our Bitget Protection Fund to US $300 million with transparent wallet addresses and guarantee no withdrawal for 3 years. As far as I know, our Protection Fund is the second largest among all CEXs so far.

The next thing we worked on is our Proof-of-Reserves. We have developed a verification tool “Merklevalidator” internally and with free access to open-source codes on GitHub. Not only showing reserve status as a whole in the company, users can also verify their own account’s proof of reserves with the tool, and proving our exchange reserve to users assets is at least on an 1:1 ratio.

Aside from financial measures, Bitget’s team has also been working strenuously on platform security as well. Bitget’s security team adopted measures such as mature risk control systems, advanced security governance, trusted wallet encryption and many more to keep cybersecurity threats under control.