2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index: World’s Crypto Economy Held Firm Through the Bear Market

Summary

• Crypto economy overcame worst market since 2022: Even as crypto’s total market cap fell about 50% (a $2.1 trillion contraction), on-chain economic activity slipped just 1.6%, from $9.5 trillion to $9.4 trillion. A growing diversity of use cases, not price speculation, kept the economy steady.
• A new methodology reframes how we measure adoption: This seventh edition of the report ranks countries across four factors: service flows, domestic peer-to-peer activity, cross-border flows, and on-chain balances. Measured this way, grassroots adoption proved resilient worldwide, with emerging markets leading the way.

• Brazil ranked as the world’s top country for grassroots crypto adoption: At $252.5 billion, Latin America’s largest crypto economy placed in the top four worldwide across every factor the index tracks: second in cross-border flows, third in total service flows, third in its domestic peer-to-peer economy, and fourth in on-chain balances.

The 2026 Geography of Crypto Report

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Cryptocurrency is a global movement with countless identities. For capital allocators in the West, it’s a tech upgrade: tokenized assets could reshape the way assets trade. For low-wage workers in the Global South, it’s a lifeline: stablecoins help them move value quickly and hedge against political and economic uncertainty. For everyday people, everywhere, it’s an alternative investment.

This year’s Geographies report provides a look at one of the most extreme stretches for crypto markets on record. Between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, (the period this report focuses on), Bitcoin climbed to both an all-time high and then recorded its largest-ever dollar-value retreat, losing $67,000 from peak to trough. The overall crypto market cap’s 50% drawdown (a $2.1 trillion contraction) defined the worst crypto bear market since the cascading collapses and scandals in 2022.

As is often the case with crypto bear markets, this year’s stunted economic growth. But it did so only modestly. We found the world’s crypto economy (a combination of service inflows, domestic peer-to-peer activity, and cross border transfers) shrank 1.6% from the prior period. (You can read more about our methodology in determining the crypto economy at the end of this chapter). This metric, which combines many of the factors that drive our adoption index, shows $9.4 trillion in economic activity for the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, compared to $9.5 trillion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2025.

The 2026 drawdown might have been worse. A market half as valuable as it used to be must work twice as hard to register the same effect. If crypto were only being used as an investment nowadays, then indeed, the 2026 period’s lower prices might have reduced global value flows even worse than in the 2023 period. That time saw a bigger drop as measured by percentage (-23% vs -1.6%) and in pure dollar terms ($1.2 trillion vs $0.1 trillion) despite a much smaller contraction in overall crypto market cap (-$0.3 trillion vs -$2.1 trillion).

Crypto’s growing diversity of use cases blunted the contraction.

In this eight-chapter report, we explain how these identities are shaping crypto adoption around the world. We tell stories, region by region, using data and on-the-ground insights, that show how real-world events affect on-chain economies. In the next chapter, on Latin America, we explain how a whole region bucked the global trend, growing its crypto economy 9.8% period-over-period, driven by a collective pivot to stablecoins and the use of cryptocurrency as a hedge against currency volatility. In a later chapter, we discuss how Sub-Saharan Africa led the world in growth on the back of exceptionally strong peer-to-peer activity.

We’re also rethinking how we measure adoption. Our seventh annual edition of the Geographies report debuts a new methodology for tracking adoption. It weighs service flows, domestic peer-to-peer crypto transactions, cross-border crypto flows, and the accumulated balances that countries hold on-chain. The end of this chapter explains the full methodology.

Retail-sized crypto transfers saw the sharpest growth

Much of the world’s crypto economy comes from the services people use to buy, sell, trade, borrow, lend, and send cryptocurrency. We track this large portion of the economy to understand what kind of users are driving activity. In the 2026 period, we found that small-dollar inflows into these services grew. Transfers of under $100 rose 78.4%, and transfers of $100 to $1,000 rose 58.6%. This retail-level participation is only one small contributor to the 2026 period’s economic picture, amounting to just $273 billion of nearly $10 trillion in activity. But it indicates that retail-level users persisted through the bear market.

Institutional-sized transfers also proved relatively resilient amid the pullback in prices. Transfers of $1 million or more dropped just 7.2% period over period. This is a notably small drawdown given how severely prices dropped. The crypto they had was worth, in the worst cases, 50% less than it used to be. As we pointed out before, you have to move twice as much of an asset that’s become half as valuable to get where you were before. The institutional-sized flows market overcame this challenge, keeping the drawdown in check.

Cross-border stablecoin transfers boomed

Emerging regulatory frameworks, including the GENIUS Act in the U.S., MiCA in the EU, and action in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the U.K., are driving stablecoin adoption. Our conservative estimate of monthly cross-border stablecoin value more than doubled from $11 billion in January 2025 to $24 billion in June 2026, with actual volumes likely much higher. Stablecoins moving across borders rose 77.5% over the period, from $124.2 billion to $220.3 billion.

This cross-border growth comes from payments that average about $3,000: a transaction size far too small to be institutional. Instead, it aligns with everyday use cases: a person paying a supplier, sending money home, or moving savings out of a currency they no longer trust.

“Activity has become consistent, routed through wallets in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts,” Philip Gradwell, vice president of economics at Tether, told us. “That is the signature of trade and business activity, not speculation.”

All cross-border flows have an origin and an end point, forming what trade economists call “corridors.” The top quartile of corridors accounts for 96.1% of cross-border stablecoin value. They grew 70.8% over the period.

As stablecoins integrate into global commerce, they boost flows across once quiet corridors. Before the 2026 period, the bottom three quartiles of corridors saw just $0.26 billion. This period, they carried $8.66 billion. New corridors opened rapidly. We tracked 4,708 new corridors in the 2026 period that cumulatively carried $2.64 billion. Much of this activity was in the world’s largest stablecoin, USDT.

“The real power of USDT is in the long tail, the parts of the economy that were priced out or shut out because traditional financial technology was too expensive or too restricted,” Gradwell said. “USDT can serve them because it costs on average one cent per transaction, settles instantly, and needs nothing more than a phone.”

Our cross-border measure counts only transfers where we can attribute both the sending and the receiving side to a country. Transfers involving wallets we cannot place, or routed in ways that obscure one end, fall out of the count. The actual volume of stablecoin value crossing borders is therefore likely much higher than $220.3 billion.

Peer-to-peer rallies across the world

Crypto services had a hard year, and peer-to-peer activity did not. Value flowing into exchanges, DeFi protocols, and other businesses fell 4.3%, from $9.30 trillion to $8.90 trillion. Value moving directly between personal wallets inside countries rose 302.9%, from $56.8 billion to $228.7 billion. Peer-to-peer went from 0.6% of the two combined to 2.5%, and its share rose in all eight regions.

Most of what arrives at a service is a trade or an on-ramp, and both track price. When the market halves, the same trade carries half the dollars, and speculative turnover falls with sentiment on top of that. A stablecoin payment does neither. It is denominated in dollars, it is sized by what the sender needs to move, and it happens whether the market is rising or falling.

The split shows up inside each channel as well as between them. Service inflows in stablecoins rose 5.3% even as total service inflows fell. Domestic peer-to-peer across all assets fell 19.7% even as its stablecoin slice rose 377.7%. What separates the two channels is what moves through them: peer-to-peer is now 96% stablecoins, services are not. The bear market hit the price-sensitive half of crypto and left the payments half alone.

Stablecoins held as an anchor through the uncertainty

On-chain balances, the total USD value of crypto held in wallets and on services at a point in time, moved with the market. Global measured balances fell from a September 2025 peak of $0.86 trillion to $0.44 trillion in June 2026.

Stablecoin balances held between $98 billion and $109 billion across the nine-month drawdown. Because stablecoins are pegged to the dollar, their on-chain value does not fluctuate with crypto prices. Everything else fell 55.6%. Their share of global balances reached 22.5% by June 2026, not because holders bought more but because the assets around them lost value.

This pattern is not new. Stablecoin balances grew 72.5% between December 2022 and September 2025, then held their level through the 2026 drawdown. Each cycle starts from a higher stablecoin base than the last, and stablecoins’ share of total balances rises whenever the broader market drops.

In the eight chapters ahead we will provide deeper, region- and country-level analysis of the four factors we described above: service flows, wallet balances, in-country economies, and cross-border flows. All are shaped by the many identities of crypto.

Brazil is the top country for crypto adoption

Combined, these measures show that Brazil leads the world in grassroots crypto adoption. It was not the strongest in any single category we track. However, in a year when bear markets stunted global growth, it continually delivered strong performance relative to its size, beating more established markets like the United States. We will extensively discuss Brazil’s $252.5 billion crypto economy in the next chapter: Latin America.

The top 20 countries by grassroots adoption

Our methodology

Our grassroots adoption index measures the strength of crypto adoption around the world. It combines four sub-indexes that each represent a part of the overall crypto economy.

• Service inflows: Value received by centralized exchanges, DeFi protocols, and other crypto services, weighted by a country’s GDP per capita.
• Domestic peer-to-peer transfers: Value moving directly between personal wallets inside the same country.
• Cross-border transfers: Value crossing a national border, covering four routes: person to person, person to service, service to person, and business to business.
• Balances: Holdings at a point in time, combining geolocatable personal wallets with the balances held on select service types, including exchanges, no KYC exchanges and peer to peer exchanges.

We rank the 117 countries for which we have sufficient data. To do this, we first weight the raw values by each country’s purchasing power parity and then rescale every country onto a common 0-to-1 scale by min-max normalization, placing the lowest-ranked country at 0 and the highest at 1.

A country’s overall index score is the geometric mean of its four normalized scores. This method rewards countries that perform consistently across all four measures and prevents dominance in a single category from masking weakness elsewhere. For our grass roots index, our rank 1 country, Brazil, for example, does not rank number one on any individual index subcomponent, but scores well across all the measures, making it the overall rank one globally.

How we assign crypto activity to a country

Personal wallets are geolocated through behavioral indicators, such as interactions with a domestic, single-country exchange. Services are harder: an exchange pools every customer’s funds into the same on-chain addresses, so the blockchain alone cannot tell us where its users are. For these, we allocate a service’s value across countries in proportion to the share of that service’s website traffic coming from each country. The same allocation applies to service-held balances.

Additionally, a visit from a high-income country typically represents a larger transaction than one from a low-income country. We therefore weight each country’s traffic share by the square root of its GDP per capita and renormalize. Using the square root, rather than wealth itself, keeps the adjustment proportionate so wealth influences the split without dominating it. The total global value to be allocated is unchanged; only its distribution between countries moves as a function of each country’s wealth level.

To illustrate: in June 2026, South Korea and India each accounted for 8.1% of one major exchange’s traffic — $9.71 billion apiece of the $119.30 billion it received that month. After adjustment, South Korea’s share rises to 11.6% ($13.87 billion) and India’s falls to 3.2% ($3.78 billion). The 3.7x gap between them is the square root of the gap in GDP per capita, $36,239 against $2,695. The exchange’s total is unchanged: the adjustment moves value between countries rather than creating it.

We acknowledge that web traffic data are imperfect. A best effort has been made to clear out VPNs and bot traffic, but this process can be imperfect.  In the end, our index accounts for hundreds of millions of cryptocurrency transactions and more than 13 billion web visits. We also compare findings with insights from local crypto experts and operators around the world, giving us more confidence in this methodology.

What time period our index covers

Our index covers 12 month periods running from July 1 to June 30 of the following year. Periods are labeled by the year in which they close. The 2026 period covers July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Likewise, the 2025 period covers July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025.

Definitions

The crypto economy

We express the overall crypto activity associated with a country by calculating its on-chain economy. The resulting country-estimates can be thought of as a measure somewhere in between GDP (a measure of goods and services bought and sold locally) and financial flows (such as trading volumes on a major stock index). Practically, the all-in economy measurement combines three factors:

1. Service inflows: Value received by crypto services, including centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, institutional platforms, lending protocols, and bridges. Activity is assigned to the country of the people using the service, estimated from web traffic, rather than to the country where the service is incorporated. Values are adjusted for income differences using the square root of GDP per capita.
2. Domestic peer-to-peer transfers: Value moving between personal wallets within the same country. Stablecoins count at any transfer size. Bitcoin counts below $10,000. We cut Bitcoin off at this level because it reflects domestic peer-to-peer activity and avoids inflation due to how UTXOs move value between counterparties and change addresses.
3. Cross-border transfers into personal wallets: Value arriving from abroad in a resident’s personal wallet, whether an individual sent it or a service paid it out. Stablecoins count at any transfer size. Bitcoin counts below $100,000. We cut bitcoin off at this level because it reflects cross-border remittance and trade activity and avoids inflation due to how UTXOs move value between counterparties and change addresses.

Stablecoins move for payment, savings and settlement at every size, so we impose no cap. Bitcoin at large sizes behaves differently, and including it without a limit would let treasury and trading movements dominate a measure built to capture how people use crypto.

We attribute each transfer to the place it lands. Transfers from personal wallets into services, and between services, are not added on top. They already arrive at a service, so they sit inside the first category, and counting them a second time would inflate the total.

This matters when comparing our figures with others. A measure that sums inflows and outflows, or that counts a transfer at both ends, will produce a larger number for the same underlying activity.

Our estimate is a lower bound

Our measurement of the on-chain economy very likely underestimates the true total; the crypto economy in every market is larger than what we report. We designed our metric conservatively in order to achieve greater precision. We filter out activity in two ways:

1. Excluding unclustered service noise: Outside the service layer, only stablecoins and smaller Bitcoin transfers count. Ethereum, other tokens, and larger Bitcoin transfers between personal wallets could be real economic activity but are not in the total.
2. Excluding transfers with unknown provenance: Transfers we cannot confidently attribute to a country are excluded.

Additionally, our data sets on personal wallets begin coverage in July 2022. Therefore the full measure is only available from the 2022 reporting period onward. Earlier years reflect service activity alone and are not comparable.

The 2026 Geography of Crypto Report

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