Global Crypto Adoption is Exploding – But NOT Where You’d Expect!

Bitcoin and crypto have been on a tear this year but behind the price action how is the global adoption of crypto progressing how many people have crypto wallets now and how many poor souls still don't know what a blockchain is link everything to the blockchain oh I know all about blockchain stay tuned to find out the answers to these and other pressing questions about global crypto adoption courtesy of an impressive new report based on almost 20,000 interviews with people in 18 different countries this is a serious data set we've got here stick around to the

end of this video so you don't miss the key takeaways okay today's report is titled Global survey on crypto and web 3 and it's the second edition of an opinion survey published by consensus if you're new here you're probably thinking consens who well feel free to skip ahead if you're already familiar but otherwise here's a quick intro consensus is one of the biggest names in the ethereum universe and by extension in all of crypto it was founded in 2014 by ethereum co-founder Joseph Luben and is best known as the developer of metamask which has remained

the leading web3 wallet for evm compatible blockchains since its launch in 2016 now apart from metamask consensus is also responsible for a large portion of the tools and infrastructure used by ethereum developers as such consensus is probably second only to vitalic buaran himself in its influence over ethereum well maybe tied with Lido actually but who's counting this influence has led to some ethereum centralization concerns but that's a conversation for another video if you're familiar with the general ethos of ethereum then you'll know what consensus is all about the company has fingers in too many pies

to list them all here but just know that these guys are a serious outfit of ethereum ogs now before I start reeling off statistics we need to know how this survey was conducted and who its respondents were after all it would be very easy to cook up bullish opinion survey results if your sample was a bunch of Deens over on crypto Twitter but it would also be a bit of a stretch to describe that data as public opinion the good news is that consensus commissioned yugov one of the world's top online research data and analytics

agencies to conduct this survey it's not every day you see crypto firms publishing data collected by such a high-profile olster so this is an encouraging start of course every poll will have limitations and there are plenty of valid criticisms of polling in general which we'll leave for another YouTube channel but as far as pollsters go yugov has a reputation for conducting reliable and accurate surveys and being transparent about its methods so for this survey yugov interviewed 18,652 people aged 18 to 65 across 18 countries in the first half of 2024 the survey consisted of 35

questions posed to a representative sample of each country's population the data collected were weighted by age gender and region to ensure accurate representation of each local population the data were then analyzed by respondents experience with crypto and web 3 and year-over-year Trends to form the 2024 survey results and key findings so overall consensus and yugov are giving us confidence that this survey was an ear attempt at fact finding and not just crypto industry PR for the sake of it there are many intriguing data points about public perceptions of blockchain crypto and web 3 in this

report but before we start interpreting any of them we should first ask how well informed our respondents were about these topics as we saw from the methodology yugov interviewed a representative sample of each local population as it happens different populations are informed very differently one of the survey questions was designed to gauge understanding of blockchain and we can use the responses to get an idea of how well-informed respondents are about crypto and web 3 which are of course built on blockchains respondents were asked to correctly select a statement describing blockchain and specifically the correct statement

read quote a secure decentralized and transparent digital Ledger that records and verifies transactions now unfortunately we don't have the other statements so we don't know how subtly or obviously incorrect they were but at any rate they will have been incorrect descriptions of blockchain right anyway the results here are really interesting Nigeria had by far the best informed respondents of any country with 77% correctly choosing this statement this is not too surprising though because Nigeria is Head and Shoulders above almost every other country when it comes to mass adoption of crypto for example in chainalysis is

2024 index of crypto adoption around the world Nigeria was ranked second back in the consensus survey South African respondents came in second place with 52% choosing the correct description of a blockchain it looks like South Africa is quickly gaining on Nigeria as this figure is 22 percentage points higher than it was in the 2023 edition of the same survey this is a much greater year-on-year increase than in any other participating country however not every country is so well informed about blockchain in most participating countries around a third of respondents chose the correct definition in Japan

the result was dismal with just 15% of respondents choosing the right definition if we can take this to mean that a large majority of people do not know what a blockchain is then that's pretty exciting even a small proportion of these people learning about blockchain will likely mean a significant uptick in new crypto users and by the way special mention must go to South Korea here according to the survey the percentage of respondents in South Korea who chose the correct definition of blockchain fell from 41% last year to 30% this year for reference the only

other country where correct responses fell was Brazil where the change from 20123 to 2024 was minus one percentage point so what's up with South Korea slipping 11 points blockchain Amnesia seems implausible and we can only guess that some methodological Factor produced this variants hey man hey what do you do for a living me I'm a uh I'm a crypto YouTuber yeah yeah it's pretty pretty fun job [Music] actually see you what about you what do you do for a living oh me man I check the coin Bureau deals page it's got sign up bonuses of

up to $100,000 and trading fee discounts but I mean huge trading fee discounts and exclusive altcoin Al in their Subscription Service check it [Music] out all right the next part of the survey we want to highlight is a question about the utility of blockchains consensus uses the example of AI related risk such as fake news as a problem that blockchains might help solve according to the survey 76% of respondents globally are concerned about these risks the concerns are so widely held because they pertain to our ability to distinguish truth from fiction in other words it's

less a matter of technical details about advances in Ai and more about Universal questions like can we believe our own eyes so when consensus asks these respondents whether or not they quote think blockchain technology could help mitigate these risks we consider this question as a general vote of confidence in the usefulness of blockchains the core Innovation and value of blockchain is a source of truth that doesn't rely on fallible humans trusting one another anyone with a cursory understanding of this should be able to imagine how blockchain could help distinguish authentic and false data including for

example AI generated content after all if blockchains can't provide a reliable source of truth then what are they good for let's check out the responses consensus and yugov asked do you think blockchain technology could help mitigate the risks related to AI fake news Etc and the possible answers were yes yes but I don't know how I don't know and no globally 60% of respondents answered in the affirmative however responses varied a lot from country to Country unsurprisingly countries where respondents exhibited a poor understanding of blockchain like Japan and the UK returned the highest proportion of

I don't know responses in each case around half of all respondents answered in this way more more interestingly the number of no responses outnumbered yes responses by more than 3 to one in both the UK and Japan 19% said no and just 6% said yes now Japan is a curious case because blockchain Skeptics appear to outnumber people who know what a blockchain is by a wide margin the same phenomenon can be seen in Germany which was the most blockchain skeptical country in the survey 27% of respondents in Germany answered no whereas only 25% % of

respondents correctly identified what a blockchain is one has to wonder whether some of these respondents said no simply because they have some negative feelings about crypto and by extension blockchain this is a guess but we think it's plausible just look at Germany again where the government paper handed 50,000 BTC at $53,000 this year clearly not the most locked in country at the other end of the spectrum though we have the extremely locked in Nigerians are whopping 8 5% of whom answered either yes or yes but I don't know how this must be our gold standard

a progressive consensus that comes from a population well informed about crypto and blockchain honorable mentions go to South Africa India and the Philippines where around 70 to 80% of respondents also answered in the affirmative all right so that gives us some perspective about how clu up our respondents are about blockchain and whether they're optimistic or pessimistic about its utility now let's get to the good stuff actual crypto adoption how's that going well the first data point to highlight is wallet ownership the survey asked quote how many crypto wallets do you have metamask coinbase binance trust

wallet ET Etc and the possible responses were none 1 two three or more and I don't know what a crypto wallet is once again the variance from country to country is fascinating Nigeria continues out chatting every other country in the survey with 84% of respondents reporting owning at least one wallet it's probably a good thing Nigeria's Eastern neighbor Chad didn't participate because they might have been put to shame and maybe forced to rename the entire country just kidding anyway what's amazing is that 31% of respondents representing the largest single group of respondents owned three or

more crypto wallets this is a perfect inversion of the trend in the rest of the world where owners of three or more wallets are the smallest group and meanwhile just one% of respondents didn't know what a crypto wallet is this is pretty remarkable as it suggests that Nigeria's crypto users are in Fairly deep the numbers make us think that in Nigeria crypto power users outnumber the mythical retail hordes we imagin showing up once every four years to top blast Doge and xrp even more impressive is that the number of crypto wallets owned increases with age

in Nigeria and we're not just talking from teens to 20s and 30s here the group who reported owning the most crypto wallets were Nigerians between the ages of 55 and 65 a full 52% of respondents in this bracket owned more than three crypto wallets this makes middle-aged Nigerians by far the most locked in demographic in the survey no other age bracket in any country even comes close to their level of crypto wallet ownership at The Other Extreme we find Italy the UK Japan and Argentina in Italy 68% of respondents reported not owning any crypto wallet

and 12% said they didn't know what a crypto wallet is 14% own one wallet around 3% own two wallets another 3% own three or more these numbers are more suggestive of casual use quite the opposite to the situation in Nigeria the picture in the UK UK and Japan is similar in both countries around 80% reported either not knowing what a crypto wallet is or not owning one a little over 10% reported owning a single wallet and those who owned two or three or more wallets were no more than 5% each as a Brit myself I

can only bow my head in shame well leaving aside the despair at my compatriots Argentina is an interesting case because crypto adoption there has been growing rapidly in recent years according to chainalysis Argentina leads Latin America by cryptocurrency value received which reached an estimated $91 billion between July 2023 and June 2024 now stablecoin based remittances have played an outsized role in pushing Argentina to the top spot amid runaway inflation and currency devaluation by June 2024 stablecoin transactions accounted for 62% of all crypto transactions in Argentina well above the global average of 45% however this growth

does not mean that crypto has penetrated all corners of Argentine Society in most countries in the survey between 10 and 20% of respondents reported not knowing what a crypto wallet is but in Argentina it's 32% far higher than any other country surveyed and the contrast between the most and least locked in countries becomes extreme when we look at older respondents almost 40% of Argent Ians age 55 to 65 don't know what a crypto wallet is compared to just 2% of Nigerians of the same age the Mind boggles anyway wallets aside consensus notes some encouraging developments

in respondents crypto ownership since the previous edition of this survey specifically the survey found that crypto ownership is up 8% year-on-year in Mexico up 7% in both the Philippines and South Africa 5% in Germany and 4% in Japan and the report also highlights respondents reported plans to invest in crypto of the African and Asian countryes survey a striking 87% and 51% respectively of respondents reported planning to invest in crypto in the more Crypt skeptic France and Germany the proportion of respondents who reported planning to invest in crypto increased by five and 10 percentage points respectively

now of course we like to see these numbers going up but if we want to interpret them as part of a long-term Trend in crypto adoption we'll need several more years worth of data increasing intention to buy crypto is reflective of time- specific market conditions and you'll recall that the survey was conducted in the first half of 2024 a period which might best be described as the 100K BTC waiting room needless to say when the market tops out and prices start falling off a cliff we shouldn't expect the number of people planning to buy crypto

to keep going up although the irony is of course that Peak bull market is the worst possible time to buy anything and Peak bare Market quite the opposite now another important way to measure crypto adoption is stablecoin use when asked which cryptocurrencies have you bought in the past or do you currently own the proportion of survey respondents who answered with the leading stable coins usdt and usdc increased 5% globally notably the proportion of respondents in South Africa who reported stable coin ownership was up 20% year- on-year in Nigeria it was up 18% % in India

133% in the UK 12% and somewhat surprisingly just 3% in Argentina any increase in stable coin ownership is particularly significant this year and this is because of something called usdt dominance this chart is used as a measure of how much of the crypto Market is represented by stable coins in bullish market conditions like those seen in the first quarter of 2024 when this survey was conducted usdt dominance collapsed as Market participants sought more exposure to Rising prices so for example in q1 usdt dominance fell from a January high of around 6.5% to a March low

of around 3.8% despite speculators swapping their stable coins for other cryptos during this time many countries actually saw a dramatic increase in reported stable coin ownership though this dovetails with what we know about stable coin usage in these countries it's not only driven by Deens dipping their toes in and out of the market but also individuals and businesses exposed to fiat currency risk seeking a store of wealth and a method of transferring funds that Superior to using their local fiat currency and banking system of course usdt and usdc Adoption of this kind merely means that

people are foregoing one fiat currency for another but hey stable coins are one of crypto's greatest use cases and we can't do without them so of course we welcome more adoption now the remainder of consensuses survey is less about adoptions statistics and more about public perception of crypto coded concerns such as decentralization and replacing the Global Financial system the most direct question about crypto here asked respondents to rank a series of Concepts in order of their perceived association with crypto so for example the concept that respondents most frequently associated with crypto was the future of

money for the second year running 177% answered in this way globally down one percentage point from 201 23 in joint second place were alternative to the traditional Financial ecosystem and the future of digital currency each chosen by 9% of respondents it's encouraging to see that negative associations such as scams and fishing and crime and money laundering are fairly far behind chosen by just 7% and 5% of respondents globally although these numbers are unchanged from last year on the other hand consensus' decision to display the global survey results here but not the country specific results might

be masking some less appealing numbers we say this because the report highlights in a discret footnote how the picture in the US is less Rosy 29% of us respondents associate crypto with an alternative to the traditional Financial system but an alarming 34% also associate crypto with scams and fishing almost five times higher than the global average so consensuses survey leaves us with much to think about global crypto adoption is progressing well but unevenly Emerging Markets like South Africa India and the Philippines and especially Nigeria are taking to crypto like ducks to water Europeans are more

resistant but are increasingly crypto curious how resilient this trend will be when prices start to fall is a key question we were quite surprised to see that a large majority of respondents globally cannot correctly identify what a blockchain is this suggests that crypto is still poorly understood so we have our work cut out for us as Educators and Advocates poor understanding is how outdated fears like crypto being a tool of money launderers persist although this is already quite a fringe view globally a basic understanding of blockchain can dispel this notion on the other hand people

associating crypto with scams and fishing especially in the US is is more of a problem because scams are not a misconception but a rampant problem nonetheless education is a huge part of the solution here too because scammers depend on victims being unable to recognize them and their methods now it's heartwarming that respondents limited understanding of blockchain didn't stop a global majority from believing that it can help to solve AI related risks like fake news because although this optimism exists without basis in understanding of blockchain it is surely based on positive sentiment about blockchain and what

can be more important for adoption than positive sentiment of course blockchain and crypto are not Inseparable as years of Enterprise blockchain developments have shown us still good vibes about blockchain are adjacent to Good Vibes about crypto we need both education and Good Vibes to fuel the mass adoption rocket ship and hopefully take us all to the moon so here's hoping for much more of the same good progress in 2025 and Beyond and now it's your turn folks did anything in the report surprise you do you agree that blockchain is the answer to AI generated falsehoods

flooding the internet and what can we do to get the rest of the world to catch up with Nigeria's 60-some Deens let us know your thoughts in the comments and while we're on the subject of nation states why not check out our recent update on what the bricks countries are cooking up and what it means for the future as always thank you for watching and I will see you next time this is guy over and out [Music]