Despite being one of the smaller crypto markets in the 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is also the fastest-growing market, found a report by the major blockchain analysis company Chainalysis.
According to this latest report,
“MENA-based users received $566 billion in cryptocurrency from July 2021 to June 2022, 48% more than they received the year prior.”
The report noted that MENA contains three of the top thirty countries in the company’s 2022 index: Turkey (12), Egypt (14), and Morocco (24).
Reasons behind this include use cases around savings preservation and remittance payments, as well as “increasingly permissive crypto regulations.”
Looking at these three countries in more detail, Chainalysis found that fluctuating crypto prices have overlapped with swift fiat devaluations in Turkey and Egypt, which in fact strengthened “the appeal of crypto for savings preservation.”
Turkey is the largest crypto market in the region, the citizens of which received $192 billion from July 2021 to June 2022. It, however, has seen “much slower” year-on-year [YoY] growth.
When it comes to Egypt, its remittance market is very significant. Remittance payments account for some 8% of the country’s GDP, while the national bank already started working on a project to build a crypto-based remittance corridor between Egypt and the UAE, where many Egyptian natives work, said the report.
It added that,
“Egypt’s position at the intersection of growing crypto remittances and increased inflationary pressures help explain why it’s the fastest growing crypto market in all of MENA this year.”
Between July 2021 and June 2022, it found, transaction volume in Egypt tripled compared to the year prior.
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