India Retains Global Crypto Adoption Crown Despite Regulatory Hurdles
India has maintained its position as the world’s leader in cryptocurrency adoption for the second consecutive year, according to Chainalysis’ 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index released on September 11, 2024. The blockchain analytics firm’s annual report, which analyzed 151 countries, highlights India’s resilience in the face of regulatory challenges and steep trading taxes.
The index, which measures adoption across four sub-categories including centralized exchange and decentralized finance (DeFi) asset usage, places Nigeria and Indonesia in second and third positions, respectively. The United States held steady at fourth place, while Vietnam dropped from third to fifth.
India’s continued dominance comes despite the country’s tough stance on cryptocurrencies. In December 2023, India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) issued notices to nine offshore cryptocurrency exchanges, including major players like Binance and Kraken, for non-compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. The FIU subsequently requested the blocking of these exchanges’ websites for Indian users.
However, Chainalysis found that users were still able to access these platforms through previously downloaded apps or certain trading applications that remained accessible. The total value received by the nine blocked exchanges still accounted for nearly 40% of the total usage of centralized exchanges in India as of April 2024.
Eric Jardine, research lead at Chainalysis, noted, “India has also got a fairly wide spread level of adoption across different assets of crypto despite restrictions, implying new participants to crypto would have been participating via services that were not banned.”
The report also highlighted significant growth in the Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) region, with seven of the top 20 countries in the index coming from this area. Indonesia, in particular, showed remarkable progress, jumping four places to third position and demonstrating the highest year-over-year growth at nearly 200% within the CSAO region.
Global crypto activity has surged beyond levels seen during the 2021 bull market, with growth observed across countries of all income brackets. However, high-income countries have experienced a slight pullback since the beginning of 2024.
The launch of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States triggered an increase in Bitcoin activity across all regions, particularly in institutional-sized transfers and in regions with higher-income countries. Conversely, stablecoin adoption has risen in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, supporting real-world use cases in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
As the crypto landscape continues to evolve, countries like India and Indonesia are demonstrating that adoption can thrive even in the face of regulatory challenges, signaling the growing global importance of digital assets.
