A report by Chainalysis called the 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, has listed Kenya as one of the world’s top ten (10) in the adoption of Cryptocurrency.
Only three (3) african countries made the list, with Nigeria and South Africa being the other two (2).
Chainalysis an organization which carries out analysis and provides data to various financial institutions, government agencies and exchanges, used its very own data and formula from various exchanges in order to measure the activity in cryptocurrency. It also put into account the economy size as well as the population size of each country, with the aim of showing the places where majority the do the residents have moved the largest parts of their financial activities towards cryptocurrency.
Chainalysis estimated the measured cryptocurrency activity that occurred on numerous P2P exchanges. It then distributed them by country and on the basis of the breakdown of countries that constituted to the total web traffic for each of the P2P websites.
Even with this development however, Africa still has the smallest economy for any region with regards to cryptocurrency. It has received a total of a mere 8 billion dollars (around 866.8 billion Kenyan Shillings) in cryptocurrency and sent 8.1 billion dollars (around 877.6 billion Kenyan Shillings) on-chain during the period that was studied.
The 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report also revealed that transactions below 10,000 dollars (around 1,083,500 Kenyan Shillings) are what constitute the biggest share with regards to cryptocurrency activity in Africa as opposed to all other regions, largely due to remittances.
Sadly illegal cryptocurrency activities constitute around 1.4 percent of Africa’s overall sending and receiving crypto traffic by quantity.
Majority of Africa’s cryptocurrency activity, is executed on Binance according to the report. This development is attributed to the fact that Binance offers users a variety of trading pairs alongside high liquidity.
The Central Bank of Kenya is still not swayed by the current cryptocurrency trend. It has issued several circulars to banks in Kenya, instructing them to avoid partnering or conducting business to companies that are based on or deal with cryptocurrency.
Countries like Nigeria have issued specific and strict guidelines which will ensure that crypto token investments and crypto coin transactions as well as the numerous other assets in the digital space properly regulated for instances where “the character of the investment qualifies as securities transactions”.
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