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Glossary

Rails ranking (Table 1). The index's first ranking: the unweighted sum of 21 sub-pillar scores, out of 84, answering where the crypto environment is best regardless of who needs it. Developed economies lead it, and should. See Chapter 2.3. Adoption by choice. Crypto use inside a working financial system, where the asset must win on convenience, cost, or conviction. It concentrates where regulation is clear and infrastructure is saturated, and it is comparatively rare, because the alternative is good. See Chapter 0.5. Adoption by necessity. Crypto use as a workaround for a failing financial system: a melting currency, closed banks, taxed remittance corridors, capital controls, or sanctions. The larger and less quantified of the two routes into living on crypto. See Chapters 0.5 and 1.1. Capability score. See Raw score. Capital controls. Legal restrictions on residents moving value across a border or out of the local currency. One of the five components of the Crypto Necessity Index, measured with the Chinn-Ito KAOPEN index. See Chapter 1.5. CASP (crypto-asset service provider). The licensed operator category created by MiCA; CASP authorisation in one EU member state opens the whole single market, which is why national licensing rollouts dominate the EU's trajectory scores. See Chapter 6.2. Cepo. The Argentine name for the country's two-decade stack of individual foreign-exchange restrictions, removed for individuals in April 2025. The event postdates the index's capital-controls source and is handled by footnote and a published sensitivity analysis. See Appendix A.8. Chinn-Ito index. See KAOPEN. CLI (Crypto Livability Index). The report's instrument: 79 countries, each scored on 22 sub-pillars, each an integer from 0 to 4 under a written rubric applied identically everywhere, measuring how viable it is to receive, hold, and spend crypto as everyday money. See Chapter 2 and Appendix A.1. CNI (Crypto Necessity Index). A 0-to-1 measure of how much a population depends on alternatives to its own financial system: the equal-weighted mean of five normalised components (inflation, unbanked share, remittance dependence, capital controls, sanctions exposure). The median across the 79 countries is 0.16; Cuba's 0.81 is the maximum. See Chapters 1.9 and 2.4; construction in Appendix A.7. Cold wallet. A crypto wallet whose keys are kept offline, used for long-term storage rather than payment. In this report, an emblem of holding without living. See Chapter 0.2. Conversion boundary. The definitional test separating living on crypto from merely selling it: conversion to fiat at the moment of payment counts, conversion as a precondition of economic life does not. The spending-rails pillar scores every rail type on this principle. See the method box in Chapter 0.2. Correspondent banking. The chain of bilateral bank relationships through which conventional cross-border payments travel, slow and costly compared with a stablecoin transfer, especially into high-need corridors. See Chapter 0.3. Crypto ATM. A kiosk that swaps cash for crypto, the only physical infrastructure the index measures. Density is scored against the population of each country's three largest cities; machines cluster where cash and regulatory permission do, not where people live on crypto. See Chapter 4.3. Crypto card. A debit or prepaid card funded from a crypto balance that spends at any terminal taking Visa or Mastercard, converting at the till. The top category ("Tier-1") means multiple locally licensed, exchange-native cards, such as Lemon and Belo in Argentina or Coins.ph in the Philippines. See Chapter 3.4. Cutoff. The index's hard evidence date: 31 December 2025. Only facts true on or before it move a score; later changes count solely as trajectory evidence. See Chapter 0.6 and Appendix A.4. DeFi (decentralised finance). Bank-free financial rails built on public blockchains. In the index, one of the three channels through which stablecoins can be acquired, alongside centralised exchanges and P2P. See Chapter 4.6. Delta (Δ). The places a country gains or loses between the rails and the livability ranking: the one-number statement of how much of a country's crypto story is need. See Chapter 2.5. Direct merchant acceptance. A merchant taking crypto at the point of sale, scored on documented merchant counts. Exchanges, licensed providers, and online directories do not count as merchants. See Chapter 3.3. Double-edged sub-pillar. A score read as capability in Table 1 and as need in Table 2. The remittance sub-pillar (P4.4) is the index's one case: a high crypto share of remittances signals working rails and a broken formal system at once. See Chapter 2.2 and Appendix A.3. Dual ranking. The index's central design decision: publishing a rails ranking of capability and a livability ranking of livelihood, because adoption by choice and adoption by necessity cannot be measured with one number. See Chapters 0.5 and 2.1. eSIM. A digitally delivered SIM profile, purchasable with crypto through global aggregators. With airtime and data top-ups, part of the connectivity rail, the broadest spending rail measured. See Chapter 3.6. est. flag. The dataset marker for an estimated or gap-filled value with no authoritative source, published with its basis stated. Cuba's unbanked share and remittance dependence are the prominent cases. See Appendix A.7 and A.10. FATF (Financial Action Task Force). The intergovernmental standard-setter for anti-money-laundering rules, whose guidance shapes the identity verification scored in the KYC sub-pillar. FATF Travel Rule. The FATF standard requiring identity information to travel with crypto transfers between service providers.1 The reason the index's no-verification band is empty across all 79 countries. See Chapter 5.5. Findex. The World Bank's Global Findex survey, the index's source for the unbanked share of adults (2025 wave, with documented alternates where the survey does not reach).2 See Chapter 1.3. Gap-fill. A CNI input taken from the closest credible alternate source where the primary feed lacks a country, flagged in the published dataset with its basis stated. See Appendix A.7. Hashrate. The computing power securing a proof-of-work blockchain. In this report, the measure by which Venezuela's mining-ban enforcement becomes visible: residential hashrate down 65% since 2024. See Chapter 6.3. Hawala. An informal value-transfer network that settles money through trusted brokers rather than bank rails; the pre-digital workaround where formal finance fails or is blocked. See Chapter 1.7 and Appendix A.7. KAOPEN. The Chinn-Ito index of capital-account openness, the peer-reviewed academic standard, on a 0-to-1 scale. The CNI uses the 2023 release inverted (one minus openness), so that a higher reading means a more restricted capital account.3 See Chapter 1.5 and Appendix A.8. KYC (know your customer). The identity verification a financial service requires before serving a user. The index scores its burden inverted, higher meaning freer, and finds the top band, no verification as a practical norm, empty across all 79 countries. See Chapter 5.5. Legal tender. Money a creditor is required by law to accept in settlement. No country granted crypto this status at the cutoff: El Salvador, the only state ever to do so, removed mandatory acceptance in January 2025. See Chapter 5.2. Lifelines tier. The report's name for the livability top ten (Argentina, El Salvador, Ukraine, Nigeria, Turkey, Venezuela, the Philippines, Brazil, Lebanon, Cuba): the places where living on crypto is simultaneously possible and necessary. See Chapter 2.5. Manual off-ramp. Selling crypto for fiat and paying from a bank account. It scores zero everywhere in the spending pillar, however routine it is: the rail fed a fiat life, and the payment was not crypto. See Chapter 3.5. MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets). The EU's single crypto rulebook, whose national implementations rolled through 2025. It licenses CASPs, carries compliant stablecoins such as USDC, and has delisted USDT from licensed venues, which caps EU stablecoin access below Switzerland and the UK. See Chapters 4.6 and 6.2. Mobile money. Phone-based accounts, M-Pesa the emblem, that run on feature phones as well as smartphones. A vigorous mobile-money economy is not a crypto-ready economy, which is why the index scores unique smartphone owners instead. See Chapter 1.7. Multi-SIM overcount. The inflation of smartphone-penetration figures by counting active connections rather than unique owners; connection counts routinely exceed 100% of population. Kenya's widely reported 92.9% is the cautionary case. See the method box in Chapter 1.7. Livability ranking (Table 2). The index's second ranking: the Raw score divided by 84 and multiplied by the Need Multiplier, answering where someone could realistically live on crypto and where people already need to. See Chapters 2.4 and 2.5. Need Multiplier. The factor that converts need into ranking weight: 0.5 plus 1.5 times the CNI, mapping need onto a range from 0.5 to 2.0 times capability. A country at the median of need keeps roughly its capability rank. See Chapter 2.4 and Appendix A.7. OFAC. The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, administrator of American sanctions programmes. With SWIFT status, one of the two inputs to the CNI's sanctions component. See Chapter 1.6. Onchain user. A person who actually transacts on a blockchain, as against merely holding the asset. The report's strict measure of the living-on-crypto population: 40 to 70 million people in 2025, against roughly 716 million owners. See Chapter 0.4. On-ramp / off-ramp. The routes between local fiat and crypto: the on-ramp moves money in (bank deposit, card, gateway, P2P), the off-ramp moves it out. Exchange access (P1.1) scores the on-ramp by quality of method, not by counting logos. See Chapter 4.2. OTC (over the counter). Trading conducted directly between parties, off exchange order books, typically through brokered desks handling large or discreet volume. See Chapter 6.3. P2P (peer-to-peer). Individuals trading crypto for fiat directly with each other, through escrow platforms, Telegram groups, or cash meetings, rather than through an order book. The index's shadow rail: deepest where formal rails are closed. See Chapters 0.1 and 4.5. P2P bonus. The P2P liquidity sub-pillar's published score, deliberately excluded from the capability total because P2P depth correlates with need (+0.49 with the CNI, +0.50 with capital controls) and barely at all with the rest of capability. Used as a tie-breaker and a diagnostic. See the method box in Chapter 2.2 and Appendix A.6. Pillar and sub-pillar. The index's score tree: 22 sub-pillars, each an individually scored condition on the 0-to-4 scale, grouped under five pillars (access, regulation, spending rails, infrastructure, ecosystem). See Chapter 0.6 and Appendix A.3. Quintile scoring. Relative banding that places a fifth of the 79 countries in each band, used for the four sub-pillars whose underlying quantities have no natural absolute thresholds. A country can improve in absolute terms and still drop a band if peers improve faster. See Appendix A.4. Raw score. A country's capability score: the unweighted sum of 21 sub-pillars, out of 84, and the input to both rankings. Also called the capability score. See Chapter 2.3 and Appendix A.6. Remittance dependence. Inbound remittances as a share of GDP, one of the five CNI components, clamped at 25%. A different quantity from the crypto share of remittances scored in P4.4, with which it correlates only mildly. See Chapter 1.4 and Appendix A.7. Self-custody. Holding crypto in a wallet whose keys the user controls, rather than on an exchange or with a custodian. The EU's Transfer of Funds Regulation triggers verification for transfers to self-custodied wallets above €1,000. See Chapter 5.5. Sensitivity analysis. The published recomputation of the livability table with the twelve documented 2024 and 2025 capital-account policy events scored as scenario values. Argentina remains first and El Salvador second in both variants; the largest movement is Sri Lanka, seven places. See Appendix A.8. SEPA. The Single Euro Payments Area, the EU's shared bank-transfer rails. The channel that regulated stablecoin bridges ride to pay European household bills. See Chapter 3.5. Spot ETF. An exchange-traded fund that holds crypto directly, giving investors price exposure through an ordinary brokerage account without touching crypto rails. In this report, holding one is the paradigm of owning without living. See Chapter 0.2. Stablecoin. A crypto token pegged one to one to a fiat currency, in practice overwhelmingly the US dollar. The asset that made living on crypto viable as a unit of account, and the working successor to the mattress dollar in the inflation belt. See Chapters 0.3 and 4.6. Stablecoin bridge. A regulated processor that converts a stablecoin payment into the local bank rail invisibly inside a single payment action. Under the report's direct-payment rule it counts as crypto acceptance, because the user's money lived in crypto until the moment of payment. See Chapter 3.5 and Appendix A.4. Staking. Locking crypto to help secure a proof-of-stake network in exchange for yield. Investment activity inside the asset class, and therefore outside this report's definition of living on crypto. See Chapter 0.2. SWIFT. The interbank messaging network through which international payments are instructed. Exclusion from it is the bluntest form of financial exclusion the CNI measures. See Chapter 1.6. Three-layer verification. The process behind every score in the dataset: a baseline from the working dataset, an independent model-assisted re-derivation, and a human ruling against primary sources, bucket by bucket, with every correction documented. See Appendix A.5. Trajectory flag. The marker attached to a score that is correct at the cutoff but carries a legislated end date or pending change: South Korea's tax zero expires in January 2027, Thailand's exemption in 2029. See Chapters 5.3 and 6.5. Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR). The EU regulation implementing the Travel Rule, whose €1,000 verification threshold for transfers to self-custodied wallets caps most of the EU's KYC score one band below the world's open markets. See Chapter 5.5. Unbanked. Adults without an account in the formal financial system, measured from the World Bank's Findex 2025 with documented alternates. One of the five CNI components, and the second force behind adoption by necessity. See Chapter 1.3. USDT and USDC. The two dominant dollar stablecoins. USDT is the working dollar of the need economies, present in all 79 countries ban or no ban; USDC is the compliance-favoured alternative carried on licensed EU venues under MiCA. See Chapter 4.6. VASP (virtual asset service provider). The FATF's term for crypto businesses such as exchanges, custodians, and brokers, adopted in national licensing statutes from Ghana to Cuba. MiCA's equivalent category is the CASP. See Chapters 5.2 and 6.2. Vintage. The release date of the dataset an input is drawn from. CNI components may differ in vintage across components but never within one; the capital-controls vintage is the index's disclosed weak point. See Appendix A.8. Working balance. The money a person holds for recurring spending, as against savings or investments. Holding it in crypto, and converting at the moment of payment, is the core of the report's definition of living on crypto. See Chapter 0.1.

Notes

  1. Financial Action Task Force (FATF), *FATF Recommendations / Travel Rule (R.16) guidance on VASPs* (2012), https://www.fatf-gafi.org/. Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20260609110416/https://www.fatf-gafi.org/.
  2. World Bank, *The Global Findex Database 2025* (2025), https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex. Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20260610091320/https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex.
  3. Chinn, M. D. & Ito, H. (Portland State University), *The Chinn-Ito Index (KAOPEN), 2023 release* (2023), https://web.pdx.edu/~ito/Chinn-Ito_website.htm. Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20260303123244/https://web.pdx.edu/~ito/Chinn-Ito_website.htm.