Report contents
APAC · Frontier
China
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 | 24 / 84 |
| P2P liquidity bonus (tie-breaker) | +1 |
| Inflation 0.1% · unbanked 11% · remittances 0.2% GDP · capital controls 0.84 · sanctions 0 | CNI 0.191 |
| Need multiplier | ×0.786 |
| Livability score | 0.225 |
Raw 24/84 = 0.286 capability. Crypto-Necessity Index 0.19, from five components: inflation 0.1% (three-year average 2023 to 2025), unbanked 11% of adults, remittances 0.2% of GDP, capital-control intensity 0.84 (KAOPEN 2023), sanctions exposure 0. Need multiplier ×0.79. Livability score 0.225, rank #75 of 79.
Three findings
The cleanest zero in the index, sitting on top of one of the largest user bases in the world
China posts a perfect 0/20 on regulation: every sub-pillar, legal status, tax, income legality, KYC and trajectory, scores zero. Yet an estimated 35 million users transact through shadow OTC networks on WeChat and Alipay, with USDT preferred and tens of billions of dollars moving annually. The law says nothing is legal; the lived behaviour says otherwise, and the gap between the two is the country's entire crypto story.
A ban that kept widening right up to the cutoff
A May 2025 decree, effective 1 June, criminalised the personal holding of digital tokens by individual citizens, and a 28 November 2025 central-bank meeting of 13 agencies reaffirmed the prohibition and explicitly named stablecoins as forbidden, closing the last perceived loophole. On 29 October 2025 a Beijing court jailed five OTC operators who had handled roughly 166 million dollars, characterising the activity as disguised foreign-exchange trading.
Behaviour persists because the issuers do not block the door
The official banking and payment rails, Alipay, WeChat Pay and UnionPay, are fully closed to crypto, but neither Tether nor Circle restricts mainland addresses, so technical access remains for risk-tolerant users via informal escrow and VPNs. DEX usage rose 210% in 2024 despite the requirement to route around the firewall.
In one line
"China has written the most complete prohibition on the planet and enforces it harder every year. Tens of millions of people still hold crypto anyway. The rulebook and the street have stopped agreeing."
Watch in 2026
Trajectory 0/4, actively tightening. The 28 November 2025 central-bank meeting reaffirmed the total crackdown and named stablecoins explicitly, Notice No. 42 (signed by eight agencies) extended the ban to real-world-asset tokenisation and named Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT, and the October 2025 Beijing convictions set a sentencing precedent. New categories keep being added to the prohibition rather than removed.