How crypto is being adopted around the world

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milroad show The Daily crypto show where our crypto insights stick The Landing like an Olympic champion gymnast I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today is the crypto Olympics where which countries are leading the way in crypto ownership adoption and activity and how does global crypto adoption impact your Investments here to guide us to this conversation it's Kyle rehead milro co-owner and head of research at melro Pro before we jump in today's episode is made possible by coin API make sure you stick around to learn about their offer just for you milk Road listeners every crypto project needs reliable onchain data at milk road we trust coing gecko API for Dependable crypto prices for you

and it's not just us coino API supplies thousands of crypto projects with Comprehensive data including prices market trends nft data and onchain Dex data best part its integration and developer resources make it easy to set up Friends of the Milkman guess what you get a free trial right now visit coingecko.com API and use code milk Road trial today Kai let's start off with why did we want to have an episode other than it's fun to talk about the Olympics and Nations competing against each other and I bet you if you're listening to this you're wondering hey how how's your country and how's your continent doing in crypto adoption uh but more importantly why is

it relevant for investors in the crypto markets to understand Global crypto adoption yeah so this this actually came out because um our team we have between milroad and our other company we have close to 30 employees and they're from all around the world I think we represent something like 15 or 16 different uh countries and it's on many different continents and we were all having discussion the other day about crypto and trying to like understand how each of us use crypto uh and how people they know use crypto in their country and we came to realize it is very very different in different parts of the world it's different in the way that people use it it's different in the reasons why people use it it's different

in the like applications and the blockchains and even like the centralized exchanges uh the websites it's like the the assets it's a very different world depending on where you are in the world and what I came to realize is like hey this really matters because you know in Canada and in North America let's call her the Western countries you know we see crypto very differently than people that are in South America or people that are in Asia uh and the differences are very big and so if you only think about it in your world which is often what we do you really are missing the forest for the trees on what could be happening somewhere else and you might have adoption massively somewhere else around the world in a way or for a reason that

you're not thinking of or you don't care about and you're going to miss something really really big and um the more I speak speak with people around the world the more I realize I don't know about what's happening with crypto adoption um now thankfully I do because I've also traveled the world and and I've been doing this for many many years so like to say I don't know is is not what I meant to say but like many people don't realize what's really happening around the world I think it matters so much I'd also love to know where our listeners are this episode is for you this show is for you guys listening so if you're listening comment on Spotify on YouTube where are you located in the world and what's your main reason for using crypto let get a little competition here folks let's see

where all of you guys are from and who is leading the way in crypto adoption and what your use case is because as we see it's so different depending upon where you are in the world and that's a really key thing to understand we all need to understand each other's reason for using crypto because it's going to broaden our perspective and help us make smarter decisions yeah well and also crypto is just a very Global thing right like when you think of investing in the stock market for example you're investing in I don't know the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ it's mainly companies that came from America and the apps are mainly used by Americans or North Americans and like Europeans right and like if you go into China and you start using their apps you've never

heard of these apps they look way different than apps that we know of their stock markets way different and it's a whole different world and crypto is that except it's investable to anyone around the world and so when you're investing in whatever it is you're not just playing against other people like you you like you are when you invest in the NASDAQ I'm typically playing with against other Americans and other Canadians right but when you are investing in crypto and I say playing because these are markets it's it's you know peer-to-peer you're you're playing against others it's like when you're investing in crypto you're playing against people in all parts of the world and that's not how the stock market works so it's a whole different Dynamic let's jump in without further Ado what is the breakdown of crypto start with

crypto ownership by continent what are we looking at when we look at that yeah so this was um we actually put a newsletter out on this I think a week or two ago and I think the most interesting stat here was that the fastest growing um continent right now for crypto is South America 116% in the last year growth from 2023 to 2024 now they're not the largest um user base of crypto that's Asia which is massive 326 million um I mean they have a lot more people in Asia than anywhere else in the world so that would make sense but they are also very much early adopters of crypto versus kind of the rest of the world um but you have um you have basically Europe which is growing at 60% we have Latin America growing at

116% and then Africa which is pretty large of 43 million growing at only 8% so much smaller uh and then North America growing pretty good at 38.6% uh and roughly 72.2 million people and then I guess you also have over in um in Australia New Zealand uh it's tiny three million people that's it but 14% growth that's pretty impressive the other thing that stands out to me about this is the percentage per capita and South America leads the way in that as well not only they're the fastest growing they also have 12.8% of their population that owns crypto which is the highest North American next at 12% so it sort of depends on how you break down these numbers in terms of who's winning

the crypto Olympics but let's dive into each one of these continents to really understand what you said before which is how are they using crypto differently what use cases are taking off in each one of these continents you want to start us off with South America yeah for sure and just some quick context so um why I'm kind of useful to help here is I've spent the last five and a half years nomadic uh so sort of traveling around I lived in in Asia for a year in 2019 actually that's where um Jay and I started our our first company together which is kind of fun uh and then I've lived in South America for a lot South America Central America Mexico um for a couple years over the last few years I've lived in Europe uh for about half a year um I've never been to Africa so I

don't have a lot of contacts there but I have um talked to a bunch of people and read a bunch of things on what's happening in Africa so I can shine a little bit of light there I've also spent some time in Australia and um and in uh in New Zealand as well so I have that on the on the resume too so we'll we'll dive into a bunch but let's start with South America because I just came back from six months in South America uh was in Argentina Brazil Uruguay Chile and then was up in Central America with Panama Costa Rica Nicaragua and so it's very interesting there um in terms of how their financial World works it's very different than the US and Canada and Europe the Western World which most I think of our listeners come

from the big thing to understand about South America is they have a lot of issues with their currencies and they have a lot of issues with capital controls mainly this is like Argentina's the big one right now uh and that's getting fixed hopefully with their new president but Venezuela is a massive one their whole they used to have such an amazing economy and it just got completely wrecked Central America has this Nicaragua Etc as well and so one of the things that's interesting where you saw the biggest growth right now in crypto is in Latin America it's not for investing purposes right if you think about North America Etc we're typically well we want to buy Bitcoin we want to buy eth we want to buy salana we want to you know make however much 10x that's not what's happening in Latin America right now it's they need to get out of

their currencies and they need to be able so two things one they need to get out of their currency they don't want to hold the peso and so they want to hold US dollars but they can't hold us dollars because they have Capital controls so for them to for someone to send money from let's say America or Canada into Argentina it's extremely extremely expensive they lose like 102% just on sending it across that's it nothing else even if you're in Argentina and you want to move your Pesos into US dollars it's extremely expensive they actually have so they have an exchange rate and then if you go to exchange money in Argentina they they add like 10 or something 15% at changes every day on what that exchange rate is if you're a local if you're a tourist you get a better exchange rate than if you're a

local because of these Capital controls it's actually a bit crazy and very frustrating and so in Argentina it was a mess you go to a restaurant and every restaurant has a different exchange rate and so like you're kind of sitting there deciding do I pay in pesos do I pay in US Dollars like what's the better deal and you're like do I pay with your credit card but if you do some have very high fees and some don't it depends and so you actually have to with every single Bill ask all these questions and figure out what is the best form of payment is it Fiat US Dollars Fiat pesos credit card dollars or something else it's a mess not only that but if you try to hold pesos before we got to Argentina a couple weeks before they devalued the

currency by almost 50% so like you would go to buy uh I don't know an ice cream at McDonald's this is one of our employees is from Argentina and he bought it for I think was 400 pesos which was equivalent to about a dollar and then on Monday he went so four days later and it was 800 pesos still equivalent to a dollar and so if he was holding pesos he lost half of his money if he wasn't holding pesos he holding dollars that it didn't affect him so it's an absolute mess out there and what's happening is they need they just need to find a way to get dollars and it sucks doing it through the traditional Finance system and so they're all moving not all but a lot of them are moving any of those who are techsavvy let's say are moving to using stable coins which has

been a massive unlock for them they can send money from the US to to um to Argentina without 10 20% fees and they can hold it anytime they want now to get it into their currency they still have to do these like peer-to-peer ways that to find someone to like trade them cash which is a bit crazy but what's interesting is there's a bunch of new applications that are opening up um so one of our employees who's in Colombia him and his friends and a lot of people he knows they use this app can't remember the name now but he said there's tons of them all around Columbia all around Argentina where you sign up it's just an application on your phone and they automatically open a bank for you in the US okay and then they tie it to a I think it's a debit card maybe a

credit card in Columbia or Argentina or whatever country and what happens is the US company because a lot of these people in Latin America work for us companies right in the tech world but we can't pay them and so what they do is they use this app we pay that bank account in the US and then when they want to use it with their credit card this app turns it converts that in in the US into a stable coin usdc or usdt and then it comes across border to Columbia and then they can pay in their currency because they sort of in the back end they flip it these currencies so they don't have to think about any of that it's super super cheap and um the applications at the back end are I think they're getting yield off the Cur the stable coins that

they're holding um but they don't even pass the yield to the the people not in America and they don't care they don't want yield they just don't want to lose I think in Argentina it's like 250% inflation over the last year which is crazy Venezuela's even worse so for them they're just looking for a life ra something to just like give them you know allow them to not lose their their money and so that's how they're adopting crypto and there's all these new apps that are coming out that we wouldn't think of if you go back to like let's say the us or Canada or Europe this isn't really a problem for us right stable coins isn't a big deal uh because we have good currencies and we don't have crazy capital controls and so we don't really need this stuff like if

you're in America you're like I have venmo I don't need to worry about sending dollars to anyone right I have a US bank account so I can get money from anyone in the world and it's pretty easy you don't get that in Latin America uh and so that 116% of adoption you're seeing is coming because of these these currencies that are inflating so seeing in in South America a clear use case around stable coins which is just developing all this ecosystem of apps around supporting South Americans in using these stable coins holding stable coins spending this money with stable coins which you can just imagine like that is just being built right now that structure so huge opportunity and things happening around that what about if we

go over to the brother up north or the sister up north to North America how do you compare these two yeah it's interesting when you speak to people in North America about crypto they're thinking of it more of the tech side about web 3 right about decentralizing the internet getting decentralized social platforms so we're not controlled by Facebook and and Google Etc that's the thing they more care about that plus investing right in the US they don't worry about their currency they want to invest and what they want most people you speak to is they want to buy a home if they're young and they can't because homes are getting so expensive right in in North America and so they see they need to invest and they see crypto as a way to sort of beat the stock market

right in the US it's also it's very easy to invest in Apple and good companies the other side of it too is in back in Latin America they can't invest in Apple in coinbase in Google and all these things they don't have the ability to do that it's very hard or very expensive so they also don't get the benefit of investing in good companies right whereas the US they have that and so they come into crypto more for the tech to have fun you know play around the meme coins uh to try to like build a business um and then to try to beat the stock market right they don't care about stable coins so much uh I think we all see it if you're really in the space we see it as a big thing but it's not why we're in the space you know we're

investing in Soul and eth and like trying to beat the stock market whereas that's not that's not what's happening in in Latin America if we go from North America which I think most of our audience will understand let's take a look at some other continents which are much more different want to jump over to Asia which as you mentioned does have the largest amount of crypto owners over 326 million what's the use case in the adoption like in Asia yeah Asia because there's I mean there's so many people there there's a lot of different things but this one's really important I think for users to understand so there's a few different ones one Asians love games they love gaming right and for them gaming it's normal to buy things in

games it's normal to pay for games it's normal to do all this kind of stuff whereas when you had all these like games in web 3 where you had to pay to get involved in the US people get all mad right in North America and Europe we're like this is weird why are we doing this like this is never going to make it in Asia they're like oh yeah is super normal of course we'll do that I'll pay for a skin I'll pay for whatever like it's they've been doing it for forever so they're big on gaming number one and they also think about gaming very differently than we do in in other parts of the world and so that's one thing to understand is so many people were fading parts of web 3 gaming because it didn't make sense in our culture but in Asia culture it's very

very big so that's one uh two depending again where you are in the world um in China let's say for example they love gaming they also love gambling so they love to get in do Leverage and pers and things like that in the market so like they're really really high volumes in the in the per side of things whereas not as much in um in North America so that's one thing to keep in mind and then if you think of um uh just the way that China Works is they don't really have cash anymore depending on the towns you're in but in the big cities in China they haven't had cash for a long time they just pay on phones they just scan and that's that's like what everyone does if you try to pay with cash in China they'll laugh you like what is

that you know what I mean like it's it's a very weird thing so like digital native currencies is kind of already the norm in China and I mean not just for young people but for like the whole population so the idea of paying in crypto is actually a little bit more natural to them for all ages not just young ages whereas in America it's like you talk to your parents about doing that and they're like what I can pay with my phone that's that's really weird right so it's a whole different Dynamic plus their Finance their finance apps are integrated into like their social media apps and they're like other apps so like to integrate Finance stuff like what we're trying to do with like far fter and lens into social it's very normal in Asia not very normal in the US so very different there then if we zoom

out we get outside of China the rest of Southeast Asia similar to Latin America they have troubles with currencies they don't have great financial structures and financial services and so um for them they see a few things one they see kind of the same as as the idea with stable coin that's very important to move money from one country to another they have Capital controls they have difficulties moving money around so stable coins great but different than how we see stable coins they use usdt they use Tron when you talk to someone in the US like Tron what do you mean use Tron you use usdt like why not usdc and bass or salana but over there they're saying the opposite they're like wait you use bass or you use like whatever like we use usdt that's our golden uh

stable coin so it's very different they use binance Tron usdt in North America we use coinbase usdc and then like I don't know Basse or salana kind of thing or so it's it's a very different Dynamic um and then when you go into more like again Southeast Asian countries um they they obviously have they're developing so they're not making as much money as the rest of the world and so play to earn airdrop farming has become really big um one of the biggest places to gain adoption in crypto this year or last year is Indonesia and where are they what are they doing it's airdrop farming and I don't think people understand this is also true in like Pakistan and IND the level of what these guys are doing

like they're onboarding millions of people because they're actually just getting paid salaries to work in in like factories where there's hundreds of people inside these factories with hundreds of phones each all airdrop farming and they make like a couple bucks an hour to do this and then the company is the one that gets all the tokens right and they're hoping that they'll make revenue from that it's a real business and so it's a whole different Dynamic than what we think of same with play to earn um with axi infinity it onboarded like millions of people from the Philippines still is today and it was a way for them to make money once again so they were sort of farming this game and again in North America you can make a few bucks a week playing these games or doing these farms and you're like whatever I don't care

it's not valuable to me but over there in some of these countries it is very valuable and so like they actually spend a lot of time doing this now is that sustainable I don't know is that like a good thing or a bad thing like I don't know but one thing I would say is because of Axe Infinity which didn't really work out cuz it it wasn't sustainable it got millions of Filipinos familiar with crypto understanding how to bridge getting a binance account understanding how to have a web3 wallet and now you have like the I can't remember what the currency of the of the Philippines is Sweet Love Potion have that on chain smooth smooth potion but yeah they H that's from axi and Penny for those that don't know but they actually have Integrations with banks now in the Philippines like it got a lot of

adoption that have opened up doors to more than just axi Infinity so it did unlock a bunch of really cool things for for the Philippines so again things that look weird to most end up being like really really good for some parts of the world which is quite interesting I want to go to Africa next but before we do I just want to you really make a good point around I think we forget that in order to get people into crypto we need some entry point we need adoption and in a lot of these countries the adoption is very different than in North America where in North America we might just be using exchanges to like buy and invest in crypto we haven't really gone a lot of people aren't going on chain they haven't taken the next step whereas in a lot of these other countries they are

taking more steps and as a result they're learning how to use crypto in a different way that we might not see in other places which could lead to a Skyrocket I think in adoption as as it picks up steam let's go to Africa what's what are we seeing in Africa yeah we'll do Africa then we'll wrap up with Europe uh maybe we'll quickly touch on the Aussies but they're not doing much but surfing and drinking beers so uh there's not much going on over there I'm just kidding I love the Aussies uh so it Africa is a very different one um so if you think of the way that Africa or Africans adopted let's say the internet they didn't have dialup and they didn't have computers they sort of leap frogged that part of the whole internet

Revolution and just jumped straight to broadband and mobile phones and in terms of financial services the same thing's happening most of them and there's millions and millions of people over there never had access access to Banks right now it depends where you're talking about of course like places like South Africa they have Banks okay but I'm talking about the bulk of people in Africa they don't have access to Banks which means they actually just don't even have access to like send money from one country to the next and so there's a few problems here one uh they don't have access to Banks they can't take out loans they can't do any of that stuff they can't store their money on their phones or on the internet right which sucks because crime is also really big in Africa and so they have to keep a bunch of cash

like let's say under their bed or whatever and people break into their house and steal their cash and like that really sucks but they don't have an alternative because there's no bank and so um that's not a deal and then also remittances is crazy in Africa you have to use like Western Union and that and they take like 20 30% of whatever you're sending back so you send like a$ thousand dollar from the US to your family there and they have to go and like pick it up in cash at whatever store could be hours away and they take 20% 30% now um there's obviously things getting it's getting better it's not as bad any anymore but still quite bad depending on where you are and so what's happened now is everyone in Africa has got access to phones and they've got access to um to the internet to

broadband and so now with crypto they can get a wallet or a bank account in a click of a button right it's so easy to get a metamask wallet or whatever in Africa and all of a sudden now they can send money from the US or from wherever and they can just get it immediately for free they've never had that before and they can store their money on their phone rather than in cash and so this is a massive unlock for Africa now it's slow there it's tough right like this isn't normal for them but the adoption is coming over there the other thing to think about is in Africa if you want to run a business you can't it's very hard to like import stuff because um one importing is difficult but then to pay for that stuff they don't have access to stripe a lot of countries they don't

have access to PayPal and so like if you think of just Commerce online a lot of places in Africa let's say the Middle East Etc they just actually can't do that and so a lot of things you would need to buy to run a business or start a business you actually just can't do it and so crypto allows them to do that and so it's opening up opportunities for different ways to run businesses to like um buy things from other countries that they just couldn't have before so I think that's a massive massive unlock in Africa and I think we'll see a big adoption there uh also you have the same idea of what I talked about with southeast Asia in terms of like airdrop farming games stuff like that things that they can make money from um they're doing that also one other thing with

Africa is a lot of them work online this is true of India as well they work online a lot of people in Africa and India work online for like American companies and it's hard for American companies to pay them and so a lot of them resort to crypto which is um going to I think continually be a huge huge unlock we do that ourselves with a lot of our employees around the world it's just so much easier to pay in crypto speaking of working online before we jump into Europe and then also I want to touch on Russia Ukraine and some of these War torn countries that are also uh in a different situation uh we are hiring right now at mil Road and so if you love crypto and you're looking for a job and you are anywhere in the world as we said it the beginning we hire from

all over the world we love to see different representation on our team different opinions different ideas so if you're looking for a job and you want to join the mcro team check the link in the show notes to see our job board we're hiring a bunch of different roles right now and we'd love to have you our listeners join the team let's go to Europe and then maybe over to Russia Ukraine Middle East some of those other countries that kind of split between continents yeah Europe um I would say we can do this one kind of quick is it's very similar to North America you know the western side of the world in terms of the countries are are are very similar they have good currencies um they're they're in it for the tech um and they're investing Etc so kind of the same idea the only main difference is

like in North America we have two currencies right you havea Canadian dollar well I guess you have three can dollar the US dollar and then you have the Mexican peso in Europe you have I don't even know like 20 30 currencies like who even knows anymore um and so uh obviously there's I mean they have like revolute apps that you can kind of switch from currencies and you can pay people so it's that it's not that bad but they definitely understand the difficulties in swapping currencies right um and and also Europeans have a lot of family that live in other countries whether that be in the US or whatever and so like they get the idea of of traveling and needing to have different currencies in different places and needing to send money and it's a bit of a pain in the traditional world uh

digitally because there's a lot of fees it can be slow Etc and so I think they get that and so stable coins makes sense to them um and uh and so like they're kind of the in between uh because they're going to they still want stable coins because it does help with a lot of the fees and the the difficulties there um so I think they they get that probably more than I would say Americans would what about Russia Ukraine these countries that kind of I I know that they're part of continents we already talked about but they have unique issues because of sanctions and the wars that they're in how are they using crypto yeah so there's um I was teaching in our course actually just recently of ways that um to keep an eye on like how crypto is going to drive

forward and so it's like Innovation regulation like all that kind of stuff and the one thing that I was thinking of is like there's also just this like necessity as like the old world fails and we have things like currencies failing or Wars happening um people are just forced to go and and use crypto right we kind of talked about with Latin America and South America uh or sorry in Southeast Asia but then you also have this idea of like what's happened in Russia and Ukraine in 2022 with the with the war was they all of a sudden had sanctions over in Russia and you had to sort of flee your country and how you going to do that bringing your value with you you can't like bring everything you own in your house you can bring your bank account like you can go with a bank

account but that's kind of tough if you're not in the country and and oftentimes they got like if you're in Russia um they just locked it you couldn't get your money out of your bank accounts right you definitely couldn't move it to another country and so like you either to bring cash but you're only allowed like $10,000 uh or you what carry some gold bars across the border like people did that but like that sucks that's heavy and so a lot of people realized oh I can just put my money into crypto put it on a ledger or not even just have it on my computer and away I go I can go anywhere no one knows I can have as much money as I want and so a lot of people are realizing how important that is um you think of countries in the Middle East

that have had sanctions for forever and same thing they can either leave and send money from family uh and back to their country through crypto but also again to buy things like look at what Russia had to do with like oil and stuff right you see this in the Middle East all the time they're talking about using crypto I think Russia just passed a law to use this so like out of necessity because of the way that geopolitics works there are many countries that are just like being forced to use crypto it's not even about in like we don't have to innovate anymore we don't need to make another use case it just all kind of works because it's just the only option for them to move their money from one place to another so there's also just like the old world sort of failing let's call it

that's just forcing people to to go that route it's incredible to step back and look at this and realize how little we know outside of our own countries the the use case is just so different and the thing that stands out to me is the adoption is happening on so many levels which is so bullish for blockchain as a whole right crypto as a whole and everyone complains about the ux and we don't have enough use cases we don't have enough apps and blah blah blah and it's like yo no one cares about your apps like poly market and your games and your social media it's like there are millions and millions and millions of people who just want Bitcoin the way it is right now they just want stable coins for the way it is right now they don't care about anything else because it is

literally lifechanging for them and their families and I'm talking hundreds of millions of people in this world probably billions if you really look at it and it's like we've already built that and it already works we just not enough people even really know it yet that's the main problem so like we don't really need that much better ux of course it would be great and yes it will get more adoption but like we're already at a point where can take off for a ton of people in this world it's just in our bubbles in Canada and the US we're like well this isn't actually that much better than the reality we live in you know and it's really important to I think move yourself out of that perspective and try to see the bigger picture here of what's happening in this world because adoption is coming from

areas not where we're sitting from Kai thanks so much for joining us today thanks for breaking it down and leading us through the crypto Olympics I hope you feel good about your cont it thanks so much for listening in everybody have a wicked awesome day thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes

only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one