A new Statista Global Consumer Survey study illustrated the various cryptocurrency adoption around the world and Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and South Africa took the top five spots.
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoption/
The survey consisted of around 1,000 respondents per country and were surveyed in 2019. Taking the top spot was Turkey with 1 in 5 Turks claiming to own cryptocurrency and Japan coming in last with only 3% claiming to own cryptocurrency.
Notably, according to the study, the overall trend was Latin America having a very prominent role among the high cryptocurrency adoption countries and Western countries having the smallest adoption. While Spain had the highest adoption in Europe, Eastern Europe and some Asian countries beat out Western European and English-speaking countries, the study revealed.
Reasons for cryptocurrency adoption trends
The adoption trends are not completely surprising since one of the main goals of cryptocurrency was to be a form of safe money access for the unbanked that live in areas with low banking penetration and/or high banking fees. A 2017 Global Financial Inclusion Database showed that while improving, the Middle East/North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa had the lowest banking access with only 44% and 47% of individuals 15+ having access to a bank account, respectively. Latin America & Caribbean was the next lowest with only 54% claiming bank account access. Interestingly, East Asia & Pacific had higher banking access than Europe & Central Asia with 71% access as opposed to 66% access. South Asia was slightly less that the rest of Asia with 66% of individuals 15+ claiming access.
The common thought would be that countries with poor banking access would have a higher cryptocurrency adoption since it is an alternative to traditional banks. However, the relatively high bank access in Asia over Europe skews this thought, but the insights are skewed by differences in which countries are included in respective geographic regions and years that data was collected. Also questionable is that Venezuelan cryptocurrency adoption was not even on the Statista chart, but there has been noticeable cryptocurrency adoption and usage in Venezuela and Colombia.
Dash adoption in these respective regions
Dash has been working hard to pursue these unbanked individuals by emphasizing its equivalence as Digital Cash by being extremely fast and inexpensive by leveraging Automatic InstantSend and very secure via ChainLocks. Dash has gained close to 5,000 merchants around the global, but around 2,000 of those merchants are located in Venezuela and over 600 are located in Colombia. Venezuela’s success in Dash adoption has largely been due to local outreach groups highlighting how Dash can help Venezuelans escape the horrors of their inflationary currency, that recently passed 1 million percent. Further, Dash adoption has been trying to make inroads in Turkey with Dash Embassy DACH making a few appearances with feedback being generally positive. Dash has had some success in Nigeria and parts of North Africa, but has not yet significantly penetrated the South African market.
However, Dash has had success even in countries with relatively high banking access such as New Hampshire in the United States due to the significant concentration of individuals that believe in the goals of cryptocurrency. Dash has also seen success in high tourist areas such as Thailand thanks to outreach groups highlighting the ease of not having to make currency exchanges.
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