Central, northern and western parts of the continent now account for 25% of all global activity, with decentralized finance leading the way.
Just as China is working on pulling itself out of the cryptocurrency market, much of Europe is diving in deeper according to a new report from blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis.
The Central, Northern, and Western Europe region has become the world’s largest cryptocurrency market over the last year, receiving more than $1 trillion in digital assets — 25% of all global activity.
Indeed, the CNWE region owes its primacy in part to China’s pullback, having surpassed East Asia thanks to both its own tremendous growth and a decline in the China, Japan, Korea region.
While CNWE transaction volume grew across the board — largely on the backs of big institutional investors — decentralized finance platforms were the biggest winners, with Uniswap, Instadapp and dYdX leading the way, the report said. Binance and Coinbase remained the top centralized exchanges.
Citing a Cointelegraph article, the report said one reason for this is that “many institutional investors who have either embraced cryptocurrency previously or even built their strategy around cryptocurrency are turning to DeFi for staking,” in order to generate interest.
Large cryptocurrency transactions by institutional investors grew from $1.4 billion in July 2020 to $46.3 billion in June 2021, a large part of it in transactions of more than $10 million. This accounts for more than half of all CNWE crypto activity.
The Global Crypto Hub
Chainalysis noted that the CNWE region is the biggest cryptocurrency trading partner of every other region it studies. It sends “at least 25% of all value received by other regions, including a whopping 34% for North America,” its largest trading partner, the report said. Eastern Asia, Central and Southern Asia, and Eastern Europe followed.
The United Kingdom is far and away the leading driver of crypto activity in the CNWE region by value received, with $170 billion, almost half of which is from DeFi protocols. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland make up the rest of the top five.
While stablecoins account for 25% to 30% of all transactions in virtually all CNWE countries, and altcoins another 8% to 11%, the report found that the combined forces of Ether and Wrapped Ether were substantially more popular than Bitcoin in almost every country — 40% to BTC’s 27% in the U.K. and 45% to BTC’s 20% in France, for example.
