Vietnam tops world in crypto adoption: Chainanalysis

Study results released Wednesday in Chainanalysis’s 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index shows Vietnam making the maximum score of 1, placing it above the Philippines (0.75), Ukraine (0.69) and India (0.66).

It is the second straight year that Vietnam has ranked first in the index. In 2019, when the study was done for the first time, the country ranked 10th.

"Vietnam shows extremely high purchasing power and population-adjusted adoption across centralized, DeFi, and P2P cryptocurrency tools," Chainanalysis said.

Chainanalysis' 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index. Photo courtesy of Chainanalysis.

The platform said it ranked 146 countries/territories by total cryptocurrency transaction value on decentralized and centralized exchanges, peer-to-peer exchange value, and DeFi exchange value, which were all weighted by purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita.

It then took the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all sub-indexes, and normalized that final number on a scale of 0 to 1. The closer the country’s final score is to 1, the higher the rank, or the more adapted the country was to cryptocurrency.

Previous studies have also found Vietnam among the world’s leading crypto and NFT players.

Some 21% of Vietnamese consumers reported using or owning cryptocurrency, second only to Nigeria at 32%, according to a survey done in 2020 by data portal Statista.

The country can be a blockchain pioneer, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said at the Vietnam NFT Summit last June.