Central, Northern, and Western Europe (CNWE) has grown into the world’s largest cryptocurrency economy since July 2020. The region has seen a massive increase in trade activity since then, especially in the DeFi space.
The European DeFi boom
Data from Chainalysis shows that CNWE received over $1 trillion in cryptocurrency over the last year alone. This represents 25% of global business activity. Furthermore, it is responsible for at least 25% of all crypto value received by other regions, including 34% of the value received in North America.
This makes the EU the most concentrated in the world in terms of the volume of cryptocurrency trading. This is partially due to increases in all forms of trading activity over the past year, coming mostly from institutional investors.
The value of large institutional transactions increased from $ 1.4 billion in July 2020 to $ 46.3 billion in June 2021, accounting for half of all of CNWE’s trading activity. The most pronounced increases were seen on DeFi protocols, where over 80% of these large institutional transactions were sent in June.
DeFi’s impact is further established when ranking coins in terms of transaction activity in the region. Despite being the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin heavily trails Ethereum in transaction volume among large institutional investors. Additionally, DeFi protocols absorbed a majority share of funds received by cryptocurrency services at CNWE in June 2021.
The decline in East Asia
CNWE has seen significant absolute increases in its crypto trading volume. However, its new position as the world’s largest shopping center is partly due to a sharp decline in market share held by East Asia, the former world leader.
In early 2019 the region held over 30% of global transaction volume. That figure has since dropped sharply to around 15% – less than CNWE, North America and even Central and South Asia.
This may be related to China’s continued push to prevent and discourage crypto trading within its borders. China re-announced its ban on crypto trading in the country a few days ago and took steps to prevent all access to exchanges in the country.
