The Banking Executive Magazine - October Issue 2022

KEY FATCS ABOUT VIRTUAL ASSETS WORLDWIDE Various key facts about virtual assets are available. Selected ones include number of users worldwide, total world market capitalization, daily traded volume, the most popular vir- tual asset, number of available types of virtual assets, number of people who owns virtual assets and country with largest numbers of crypto users. Virtual Assets Market Growth and Adoption Turkey (12), Egypt (14), and Morocco (24) all feature prominently and are seeing significant increases in use of cryptocurrency. Use cases around savings preservation and remittance payments as well as increasingly permissive crypto regulations were the main reason. According to Chainalysis, in Turkey and Egypt, fluctuating cryptocurrency prices have coincided with rapid fiat currency devaluations, strengthening the appeal of crypto for savings preservation. Also significant, however, is Egypt’s remittance market. Remittance payments account for about 8 percent of Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product GDP, and the country’s national bank has already begun a project to build a crypto-based remittance corridor between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates UAE, where many Egyptian natives work. Egypt saw the greatest transactional volume increase between June 2020 and July 2021. It increased 221.7 percent, compared to 194.8 percent in Saudi Arabia, 120.9 percent in Lebanon, 120.9 percent in Morocco and 37.2 percent in the United Arab Emirates. Outside the region, Latin America was the fastest growing market in the same period, at 40 percent. North America was a larger market, but still saw a 36 percent increase in usage, followed closely by Central and Southern Asia and Oceania at 35 percent growth. Turkey tops the MENA region in terms of value of crypto received by far, having received $192 billion worth of crypto to end June 2022. According to Chainalysis, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries play a big role in the crypto ecosystem. Saudi Arabia, for example, is the third-largest crypto market in all of MENA, and United Arab Emirates UAE is fifth. The 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index by chainanalysis, reveals that emerging markets lead in grassroots adoption, China remains active despite ban, and crypto fundamentals. the BANKING EXECUTIVE 36 ISSUE 166 OCTOBER 2022 VIRTUAL ASSETS DATA SOURCES AND STATISTICS Data about virtual assets can be obtained from various sources including: • World bank: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/ • International Monetary Fund: https://www.imf.org/en/Data • Statista: https://www.statista.com/topics/4495/cryp- tocurrencies/ • Coinranking: https://coinranking.com/ • Chainanalysis: https://www.chainalysis.com/ • Businessinsider: https://markets.businessinsider.com/cryptocurrencies • Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/ • Others Figure 2. Key facts about Virtual Assets Crypto Users 300+ million Crypto Market Cap $2.17 trillion Traded Crypto Daily $112 billion Most Popular Crypto Bitcoin % Of Americans Who Own Crypto 6% Types Of Crypto 6,000 Country With The Most Crypto India - 100 million users Source: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/cryptocurrency-statistics/