Report contents
MENA · Developing
Algeria
Crypto Livability Index 2025·data to 31 Dec 2025
Scoreboard
Five pillars, then the 22 sub-pillars scored 0 to 4. Empty sub-scores are held out of the total, not zeroed.
The number behind the rank
| Raw capability score | 15 / 84 |
| P2P liquidity bonus (tie-breaker) | +1 |
| Inflation 5.1% · unbanked 65% · remittances 0.7% GDP · capital controls 0.84 · sanctions 0 | CNI 0.323 |
| Need multiplier | ×0.984 |
| Livability score | 0.176 |
Raw 15/84 = 0.179 capability. Crypto-Necessity Index 0.32, from five components: inflation 5.1% (three-year average 2023 to 2025), unbanked 65% of adults, remittances 0.7% of GDP, capital-control intensity 0.84 (KAOPEN 2023), sanctions exposure 0. Need multiplier ×0.98. Livability score 0.176, rank #79 of 79.
Three findings
The most hostile crypto law on earth, passed in the index year
Law No. 25-10, published in Official Journal No. 48 on 24 July 2025, makes it a criminal offence to issue, buy, sell, possess, or use digital assets for any purpose, with prison terms of two months to one year and fines up to 1,000,000 dinars. It is the most hostile de jure framework in the study, and it drives every regulation sub-score to zero, the only such sweep in the index.
Enforcement targets institutions, not the street
The ban suppresses the formal market entirely, yet an in-person USDT-for-dinar market runs in Algiers and Oran via Telegram and Binance P2P (peer-to-peer trading between individuals) Baridimob pairs. A parallel foreign-exchange premium of roughly 77 percent is what sustains demand: residents pay a hard premium to convert controlled dinars into dollar-stable value.
Scoring identical to Switzerland on one pillar, by design
On remittance corridor utility Algeria scores 1, not 0, because blanket bans push retail flows underground rather than eliminating them: Algeria was the sixth-largest MENA market by crypto value received before the ban, and an estimated 20 to 50 million dollars in informal P2P inflows from the French diaspora persist against a small fiat baseline.
In one line
"Algeria wrote the harshest crypto statute in the world in 2025, and the dinar still trades for Tether in Algiers. A law can criminalise the rail; it cannot repeal the reason people reach for it."
Watch in 2026
Trajectory 0/4, actively tightening. Law 25-10 entered into force in July 2025 and Instruction 06-2025 forces fintech and digital-wallet providers to operate solely in dinars, explicitly excluding any crypto integration. No consultation toward liberalisation is on record; the only direction signalled is enforcement.