The 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report

The 2020 Global Crypto Adoption Index: 
Cryptocurrency is a Global Phenomenon

The Crypto Adoption Index | Jul ’19 to Jun ’20 

Cryptocurrency adoption continues to grow around the world. But aside from anecdotal 
evidence, there haven’t been many objective measures of how rates of adoption and usage 
patterns differ around the world. That’s why we created the Global Crypto Adoption Index. 
Our goal is to quantify the differences in adoption between countries across the globe.

However, we wanted to do more than just report the countries trading the most 
cryptocurrency. Most cryptocurrency volume moved reflects trading and speculation carried 
out by professional or, increasingly, institutional investors dealing in large sums. While 
trading and speculation are important to the cryptocurrency economy, we wanted our index 
to emphasize grassroots adoption by everyday users. After all, any long term speculation on 
cryptocurrency is likely predicated on the idea that cryptocurrency can become a 
mainstream means of value transfer and, eventually, payments. Our index is meant to show 
which countries are leading the way toward that eventuality. 

To do this, we weighted our index formula to measure cryptocurrency activity while also 
accounting for each country’s population and economy size. The intention is to highlight the 
countries where the most residents have moved the biggest share of their financial activity 
to cryptocurrency. Below, we’ll explain our index methodology in more detail, show you the 
top ten countries on the index, and share a few key takeaways. 

Our methodology

The Global Crypto Adoption Index is made up of four metrics, which we’ll explain in detail 
below. We rank all 154 countries according to each of those four metrics, 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 produce the overall rankings. The closer the country’s final score is to 1, the 
higher the rank. 

Here are the four metrics that make up each country’s final score in the Global Crypto 
Adoption Index:

On-chain cryptocurrency value received, weighted by purchasing power parity 
(PPP) per capita

The goal of this metric is to rank each country by total cryptocurrency activity, but weight 
the rankings to favor countries where that amount is more significant based on the wealth 
of the average person and value of money generally within the country.

We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and 
weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita, which is a measure of the country’s 
wealth per resident. The higher the ratio of on-chain value received to PPP per capita, the 
higher the ranking, meaning that if two countries had equal cryptocurrency value received, 
the country with the lower PPP per capita would rank ahead. 

On-chain retail value transferred, weighted by PPP per capita

The goal of this metric is to measure the activity of non-professional, individual 
cryptocurrency users, based on how much cryptocurrency they’re transacting compared to 
the wealth of the average person. We approximate individuals’ cryptocurrency activity by 
measuring the amount of cryptocurrency moved in retail transactions, which we designate as 
any transaction for under $10,000 USD worth of cryptocurrency. We then rank each country 
according to this metric but weight it to favor countries with a lower PPP per capita. 

The 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report