Foreword

In 2021 I had savings in crypto and could not easily buy a PlayStation. The money was mine; the permission structure said otherwise. Spending it meant moving funds through a chain of intermediaries, each able to flag, freeze, delay, or report, and my bank had already questioned the transfers. I assumed the industry would fix this quickly, because the gap seemed too obvious to last.

It lasted. I spent those years inside web3, a user and a builder of an industry I love and chose to help grow, and I watched it turn twice: first toward an economy that was mostly speculation, then away from the principle it was founded on, decentralisation not as ideology but as the source of the system's safety. The rails for actually living on the asset stayed unbuilt. Genghis was founded in 2025, four years after that PlayStation moment, because everything in this industry had moved except the distance between owning an asset and being allowed to live on it.

Genghis is a marketplace for people who pay for ordinary things in crypto. Some of our users are with us by preference. Most are with us because something around them failed first: a currency, a bank, a border. Serving both kinds of people, every day, raised a question we could not answer with anything in print. Where in the world does this way of living actually work?

The answers on offer measured ownership or trading volume. Neither tells you whether a person in a given country can receive value as crypto, keep it as crypto, and spend it on a bill. So we measured that instead.

The result is the Crypto Livability Index: 79 countries, scored against a written rubric on the conditions that decide whether living on crypto is viable, and the report you are holding, which reads those scores. The index ranks every country twice, once on capability and once on need, because a salaried developer in Zurich and a pensioner in Buenos Aires do not live on crypto for the same reason, and no single number serves them both.

You should know our interest plainly. Genghis is a commercial company, and a report that defines its own category serves us. We built it so that knowing this costs you nothing. The methodology is public down to the last rubric. Every score traces to a documented source.

The dataset ships under an open licence, and both rankings regenerate from a published build script. Where our inputs are weak, the limitations section says so before anyone else can. We would rather be checked than believed.

We did not invent the behaviour this report measures. People were living on crypto long before anyone named the category; what was missing was the map. To our knowledge, no one has measured these conditions country by country before, and that claim sets the standard the work should be held to.

Read it however you like, but I suggest starting with your own country. Appendix B gives each of the 79 a single page. Then go to the rubric and argue with it; it is published precisely so you can. Tell us where we are wrong, and the next edition will be better for it.

The data behind every page is the work of my co-author, Sanjay Karangiya, who built the scores and checked them until they stopped moving. The editorial judgements, and any errors that survived his checking, are mine.

One more thing, before the data takes over. I do not love this industry for the fortunes it minted. I love it because it has let individuals scattered across the planet find each other, work together, and end up friends. At its best, web3 is the connection between people who would otherwise never have met. This report is the proof: my friend Sanjay and I, an Indian and an Italian, laying one more brick of the industry that introduced us.

That is what I hope this report does to the conversation. Our industry spends its days watching a finger: the daily chart of whatever token we hold, rarely doing well the week anyone looks. The moon behind it is what we have built together: millions of people already living a simpler, better financial life on rails that did not exist a decade ago, in the countries this report maps. Their stories belong at the centre of web3, and what is already standing is proof that the future we keep describing is buildable, and nearer than the chart suggests.

Live on crypto.

Claudio Cuccovillo

Founder, Genghis

London, June 2026