Europe becomes world's largest crypto economy: Chainalysis report
Driven by increased transaction volumes on Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols, Central, Northern, and Western Europe (CNWE) received over $1 trillion worth cryptocurrency over the last year, says the report.
A report by blockchain data platform Chainalysis on Tuesday revealed Central, Northern, and Western Europe (CNWE) has become the biggest cryptocurrency economy in the world, receiving over $1 trillion worth cryptocurrency over the last year.
This represents 25 percent of global activity, it said.
"Having ranked second last year, CNWE’s new position in the top spot is the result of tremendous growth starting in July 2020, combined with a relative decline in activity in Eastern Asia. CNWE’s transaction volume grew across virtually all cryptocurrencies and service types, but especially on Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols," the report added.
Chainalysis also found an influx of institutional investment, signalled by large transactions, and drove most of the growth, although there was an upward trend in retail activity.
"Large institutional cryptocurrency transaction value grew from $1.4 billion in July 2020 to $46.3 billion in June 2021, at which point it made up more than half of all CNWE activity," it said.
Image source: Chainalysis
Chainalysis' data revealed the majority of large institutional-sized transfers went to DeFi platforms, with a majority of them made in Ethereum (ETH) and wrapped Ethereum (wETH). wETH is an ERC-20 token of ETH used in DeFi protocols.
According to the report, the United Kingdom (UK) leads other CNWE nations by a wide margin at $170 billion. 49 percent of this is value sent to DeFi protocols.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are the other countries in the top five.
Image Source: Chainalysis
Earlier in August 2021, Chainalysis ranked India second in terms of global crypto adoption in 2021, amidst global crypto adoption rising over 880 percent in the last year.
In the report titled 'The 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index', Chainalysis ranked India just behind Vietnam, which took first place out of 154 countries surveyed.
"The index ranks the top 20 countries and provides an objective measure of which countries have adopted cryptocurrency to the greatest extent after a year of exponential growth for cryptocurrency markets and increased attention for the industry," Chainalysis said in its August report.
Edited by Megha Reddy