Study finds half of bitcoin-exchange traffic comes from six countries

Users from the United States, South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Indonesia generate about half of bitcoin-exchange traffic. The highest interest in cryptocurrencies is shown by residents of Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and Venezuela. These data are contained in a new study by The Block.

Traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges allows analysts to infer which countries use cryptocurrencies most actively, they say. According to them, the pseudo-anonymous nature of the blockchain on which digital assets are built does not allow this to be determined directly.

Researchers based their analysis on data from Alexa and SimilarWeb in October for the 30 most popular cryptocurrency exchanges. This approach allows assessing retail investor activity, while large players often use APIs.

Analysts noted the absence of China and a number of other countries, whose authorities block access with the Great Firewall or its analogues. Residents of such countries are forced to rely on VPNs.

18.4% of total bitcoin-exchange traffic is accounted for by the United States; 11.4% by South Korea; 8.5% by Japan; 4.7% by India; 4.3% by Indonesia and 3.2% by Mexico. In October these countries collectively accounted for 50.5% of 111.5 million visits.

Source: The Block.

Source: The Block.

Researchers also assessed relative interest in cryptocurrencies by comparing the number of visits to bitcoin exchanges with the population of a given country. They noted that over the past year the greatest improvement in this metric occurred in South American countries, namely Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Colombia.

The top-10 countries by relative interest in cryptocurrencies are as follows:

1. South Korea — 12.75 million visits (0.25 per resident);
2. Singapore — 0.99 million visits (0.17 per resident);
3. Switzerland — 1.14 million visits (0.13 per resident);
4. Venezuela — 3.33 million visits (0.12 per resident);
5. Qatar — 0.25 million visits (0.09 per resident);
6. Australia — 1.97 million visits (0.08 per resident);
7. Japan — 9.47 million visits (0.07 per resident);
8. Hong Kong — 0.51 million visits (0.07 per resident);
9. Canada — 2.43 million visits (0.06 per resident);
10. United States — 20.55 million visits (0.06 per resident).

In this ranking, Russia sits in 27th place, Ukraine 33rd, Belarus 53rd, Kazakhstan 57th.

Source: The Block.

Earlier, a report by the analytics company Chainalysis showed, that Ukrainians and Russians are among the most active cryptocurrency users in the world.

According to Cambridge University, the number of cryptocurrency users worldwide in the last two years grew almost threefold — from 35 million to 101 million people.

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