The US Owns the Most Crypto but Uses It the Least

The Number That Didn’t Move

The seventh edition of Chainalysis’ Geography of Cryptocurrency report covered one of the strangest stretches in market history, i.e., between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, bitcoin set an all-time high but then posted its largest dollar-value retreat on record, shedding $67,000 from peak to trough.

The world’s crypto economy (measuring service inflows plus domestic peer-to-peer activity plus cross-border transfers) went from $9.5 trillion to $9.4 trillion, showcasing a 1.6% decline against a market that lost half its value.

The comparison that makes that number truly noteworthy is the 2023 bear market, which cut the crypto economy 23%, or $1.2 trillion, off a market cap contraction of just $0.3 trillion. This time the market cap fell seven times harder, and the economy lost $0.1 trillion.

Where the Growth Actually Went

Value flowing into crypto businesses (be it exchanges, decentralized finance protocols, lending platforms, or bridges) fell 4.3%, from $9.30 trillion to $8.90 trillion, while value moving directly between personal wallets inside a country rose 302.9%, from $56.8 billion to $228.7 billion, with its share climbing in all eight regions tracked.

Zooming in on stablecoins, domestic peer-to-peer is now 96% stablecoins; across all assets, that channel actually fell 19.7%, but its stablecoin slice rose 377.7%. The drawdown, in other words, fell on the half of crypto that tracks price and spared the half that moves money.

The Corridors Nobody Was Watching

Cross-border stablecoin value climbed 77.5%, from $124.2 billion to $220.3 billion, with monthly volume more than doubling from $11 billion in January 2025 to $24 billion by June 2026.

The average payment was about $3,000, a size that rules out institutional settlement and points instead at invoices, remittances, and savings being moved somewhere safer. Philip Gradwell, vice president of economics at Tether, noted:

“Activity has become consistent, routed through wallets in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts. That is the signature of trade and business activity, not speculation.”

The busiest quartile of corridors still carries 96.1% of value, but the bottom three quartiles went from $0.26 billion to $8.66 billion, and 4,708 new corridors opened carrying $2.64 billion. Gradwell attributed that long tail to cost, as USDT averages about one cent per transaction.

Chainalysis credits emerging regulatory frameworks (such as the GENIUS Act in the U.S., MiCA in the European Union, and moves in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the U.K.) with driving stablecoin adoption. Bitcoin.com News has tracked the commercial side, from Visa’s M-Pesa pilot in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 71% of Latin American institutions using stablecoins across borders.

Two Different Ways to Adopt

Chainalysis’ report ranked countries on four measures, i.e. service flows, domestic peer-to-peer activity, cross-border flows, and onchain balances, scoring each with a geometric mean, which punishes lopsided performance.

Brazil finished first, and as Latin America’s largest crypto economy at $252.5 billion, it placed in the global top four on every measure:

• Second in cross-border flows
• Third in service flows
• Third in domestic peer-to-peer
• Fourth in balances

Bitcoin.com News reported earlier this year that stablecoins had eclipsed bitcoin in Brazilian demand.

The contrast beneath was sharper as the U.S. ranked second overall, first in both total flows and balances but 20th in peer-to-peer and 11th in cross-border flows. Nigeria ranked third, doing the exact opposite, i.e. first in the world in both domestic peer-to-peer and cross-border flows, and 18th in both service flows and balances.

Those are not the same phenomenon wearing different hats. One is an investment market; the other is a payments network. Gallup data published Sept. 21 found U.S. crypto ownership had fallen to 11% of investors, a reading that says nothing about whether anyone is using it to move money.

The Anchor Underneath

Global onchain holdings fell from a September 2025 peak of $0.86 trillion to $0.44 trillion, while stablecoin balances held between $98 billion and $109 billion throughout. Everything else fell 55.6%, leaving stablecoins at 22.5% of all onchain value (not because holders bought more, but because the assets around them shrank).

Two caveats traveled with this because the methodology used this time around seems to be new. As a result, the table is not cleanly comparable to last year’s index, which put India first and Brazil fifth. Moreover, Chainalysis calls its total a floor, not an estimate, which is another factor worth considering.