If I throw the words “inclusion” and “empowerment” at you, what’s your first response? Ah, but this is cryptocurrency we’re talking about. We’re dealing here with financial inclusion (FI), meaning your ability to access financial services; we’re also dealing with perceived economic empowerment (PEE), meaning your ability to achieve financial independence.
Certain Americans with significant crypto holdings are feeling quite empowered these days. What about the billions of people around the world who live in emerging markets – those which are are trying to make the transition (whoops, there’s another verboten word) from lower class to middle class? What has crypto done for them lately? Let’s find out.
What Are Emerging Markets?
Words are tricky things; not everyone likes the term “emerging market,” or “lower class” for that matter. But until the government bans those words, any country with a semi-developed economy might qualify. The World Economic Forum has its own list for 2025, presented here in alphabetical order (using the WEF’s name spellings) with letter grades for each economy:
Is Crypto Helping Those Markets?
Some more than others. China is by far the largest market on our list; the PRC is replete with crypto miners taking advantage of low energy costs, not to mention major vendors including Binance Holdings and Bitmain.
This “market-Leninist” economy is still under the thumb of the central government, but Chinese users are taking advantage of DeFi and DEX to get around these controls. They also love their memecoins and stablecoins, pumping much-needed liquidity into the global crypto market.
Still, there are enough barriers in place to keep China at No. 20 on the 2024 Global Adoption Index at Chainalysis. India is No. 1, and Indonesia No. 3; the other emerging markets from the CSAO (Central & Southern Asia and Oceania) are the Philippines at No. 8 and Thailand at No. 16. This surge has largely been driven by CEX (centralized exchanges) activity rather than DEX (de-centralized), which is king in North America.
While India was No. 1 in crypto adoption last year, it was the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) that was driving this bus in the early years of the pandemic, with Turkiye (now No. 11) and Egypt (unranked) the fastest risers. This was all happening while those two countries were seeing massive inflation, especially Turkiye at 80.5% between 2021 and 2022.
How Is Crypto Helping?
By making more money available to more people. According to an October 2024 paper by Mohammad El Hajj and Imad Farran (as published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management), crypto adoption “significantly and positively” influenced FI and PEE across the emerging markets, as well as user satisfaction (US) and trust in financial institutions (TFI); people in these markets use crypto to sidestep the many inequities presented by their “traditional” finance systems.
The big question is whether this will continue – and to what level. It takes a certain amount of digital literacy to buy and sell crypto, and no matter which country you go to, said literacy is not distributed evenly within the populace. Countries like China continue to place manifold restrictions on crypto, albeit to limited effect, while doing any kind of finance in predominately Muslim countries like Turkiye requires some finagling.
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Expect crypto adoption in these emerging markets to continue, and for the A-graded countries like Chile and South Korea to join the global list of developed markets sooner rather than later.
