What Living on Crypto Means

0.1 A behaviour, not a belief

This report measures a way of handling money that has, until now, had advocates but no measurement: living on crypto. The phrase circulates as aspiration, as marketing, and occasionally as accusation. This report treats it as none of those. It treats it as an observable behaviour with a definition, a population, and a geography, and it spends the next six chapters and three appendices measuring where on Earth that behaviour is viable.

The definition the report uses throughout:

A person lives on crypto to the extent that they hold their working balance in cryptocurrency and route recurring personal spending, groceries, bills, phone credit, travel, gaming, subscriptions, rent, remittances, through crypto rails, converting into state currency, where they convert at all, at the moment of payment rather than as a precondition of economic life.

Three tests follow from it, and the index built in Chapter 2 scores all three. Can value arrive as crypto: an exchange, a P2P market (peer-to-peer: individuals trading directly with each other rather than through an order book), a wallet that receives a salary or a remittance? Can it stay as crypto: a stablecoin balance that does not melt, a legal regime that does not criminalise the holding? And can it leave as goods: a bill paid, a card swiped, a gift card redeemed, a merchant who accepts the asset itself?

Three findings frame the chapter:

• Living on crypto is a definable, testable behaviour. It is not ideology and not trading. The definition has edges, the edges can be scored, and the report scores them across 79 countries on the state of the world at 31 December 2025.
• Owning is not living. Roughly 716 million people owned cryptocurrency in 2025; only 40 to 70 million were active onchain users (a16z, State of Crypto 2025).¹ Between the holder and the liver sits a gap of more than half a billion people, and the conditions that decide who crosses it are exactly what this report measures.
• There are two routes into the behaviour, and they start from opposite ends of the world's income distribution. In wealthy economies, living on crypto is a choice exercised inside a working financial system. Across a wide band of the rest of the world it is a workaround for a system that has failed. The report's central design decision, the dual ranking of Chapter 2, exists because those two routes cannot be measured with one number.

0.2 The edges of the definition

A definition earns its keep by what it excludes, and this one excludes most of what the word "crypto" popularly evokes.

Holding is not living. An investment portfolio with a coin allocation, a retirement account holding a spot ETF, a cold wallet untouched since 2021: none of this is living on crypto, any more than owning gold is living on gold. The report's subject begins where the asset starts doing the work of money. Trading is not living. Speculative turnover, however large, is money chasing money. The index deliberately contains no trading-volume component, no price data, and no market-capitalisation input. A country can host a vast trading industry and be a poor place to buy groceries with a stablecoin; Chapter 2 documents several. Yield is not living. Decentralised-finance lending, staking returns, and token incentives are investment activity inside the asset class. They appear in this report only where they affect access to spendable balances.

What remains after the exclusions is deliberately mundane: rent, electricity, phone credit, bus fare, the weekly shop, the money sent home. The thesis of this report is that the mundane is the frontier. Whether crypto can entertain speculators was settled years ago. Whether it can pay a light bill in Lagos or a pharmacy in Buenos Aires is a live empirical question with a different answer in every jurisdiction, and answering it country by country is the work of the chapters that follow.

Method box: the conversion boundary. The hardest edge of the definition is conversion. A crypto debit card converts to fiat at the till; the merchant never touches the asset. Does that count? The report rules yes, and the test is where the person's money lives, not what the merchant receives. A user whose working balance sits in a stablecoin and converts at the second of payment is living on crypto; a user who sells their crypto monthly into a bank account and spends from the account is not, the rail merely fed their fiat life. The boundary runs through the moment of payment: conversion at the edge counts, conversion as a precondition does not. The spending-rails pillar (Chapter 3) scores every rail type on this principle.

0.3 Why now: the asset finally fit for the job

For most of cryptocurrency's first decade, living on it failed on the asset itself. A unit of account that moves ten percent in a week cannot price a pantry, and the volatility objection ("why spend what might double?") was decisive for holder behaviour. What changed is the stablecoin: a crypto token pegged one-to-one to a fiat currency, in practice overwhelmingly the US dollar.

By the report's cutoff, stablecoins had stopped being a niche instrument and become the largest payment story in the industry. Annual transfer volume reached $46 trillion raw, roughly $9 trillion after adjusting for bots and internal churn, on a circulating supply of about $300 billion; the issuers collectively ranked among the largest holders of US Treasuries, seventeenth in the world if counted as a country (a16z, State of Crypto 2025).¹ Two properties of that growth matter for this report. It is payments-shaped: stablecoin volume grew independently of trading volume, the signature of money being used rather than bet on. And it is borderless by default: a dollar that settles in seconds for fractions of a cent, to anyone with a smartphone, is a different economic object from a dollar in a correspondent-banking chain, and the populations who need that difference most are the subject of Chapter 1.

The institutional context moved the same direction in 2025: payment networks, banks, and brokerages shipped stablecoin products, and the United States enacted its first federal stablecoin framework (a16z, State of Crypto 2025).¹ This report takes no position on any asset's merits. It records a threshold: as of its cutoff, the instrument required for the behaviour it measures exists, works, and is held at scale. The question stopped being whether the money functions and became whether the world around it does, and that question is the index.

0.4 Who lives on crypto: the gap

Measured generously, the population of crypto owners reached roughly 716 million people in 2025, up 16 percent in a year. Measured strictly, active onchain users, people who actually transact, numbered 40 to 70 million (a16z, State of Crypto 2025).¹ Both figures are estimates with wide error bars, but no plausible adjustment closes the gap between them: at most one owner in ten actually uses the asset, and the true figure may be nearer one in twenty.

That gap is the single most consequential number in this chapter, and it can be read two ways. Read as a market, it is unconverted demand: hundreds of millions of people who already cleared the hardest hurdle, acquiring the asset, and stopped there. Read as a diagnostic, which is how this report reads it, it is evidence that the binding constraints on living on crypto are external to the holder. People do not route their rent through an asset they already own because something between the wallet and the rent stands in the way: no rail to spend on, a tax event on every coffee, a banking system that closes accounts on sight of an exchange transfer, or a ban. Those constraints are jurisdictional. They differ at every border, which is why the unit of analysis in this report is the country, and why the index is built from 22 separately scored conditions rather than one impression.

0.5 Two routes in: choice and necessity

The second structural fact about the population, after its size, is its composition. The behaviour this report measures is reached from two directions that share rails and nothing else.

The first route is choice. Its archetypes are the salaried developer paid in stablecoins, the remote freelancer invoicing across borders, the crypto-native consumer in Zurich or Toronto who prefers the rail. For this population, living on crypto happens inside a financial system that works; the local currency holds value, the bank account functions, and crypto must win on convenience, cost, or conviction. Adoption by choice concentrates where regulation is clear and infrastructure is saturated, and it is comparatively rare, because the alternative is good.

The second route is necessity. Where the currency loses a third of its value in a year, where the majority of adults have no bank account, where a quarter of GDP arrives as remittances through corridors that tax the transfer, where the capital account is walled or the country is cut from the international payment system, crypto is not a preference but the least-bad rail still standing. Adoption by necessity concentrates where finance is broken, and the evidence assembled in Chapter 1 shows it is not marginal: mobile-wallet adoption grew fastest precisely in the crisis economies, Argentina's sixteenfold in three years the emblematic case (a16z, State of Crypto 2025),¹ and in the highest-need countries crypto already carries a measurable share of national remittance inflows.

The two routes produce opposite geographies, and this is the analytical problem the report was designed around. Rank countries by the quality of their crypto environment and the wealthy world wins, as it should: it has the exchanges, the legal clarity, the cards. Rank them by where people need the behaviour and the list inverts almost perfectly. Neither ranking alone answers the question in the report's title, so the index publishes both: a rails ranking of capability, and a livability ranking that weights capability by a five-component Crypto Necessity Index. Switzerland tops the first table. Argentina, with near-top-tier rails and a population with every reason to use them, tops the second. The full machinery is Chapter 2.

0.6 How the report measures it

The instrument is the Crypto Livability Index (CLI): 79 countries, each scored on 22 sub-pillars, each sub-pillar an integer from 0 to 4 under a written rubric applied identically everywhere. The sub-pillars group into five pillars that mirror the definition in section 0.1: access (can value arrive: exchanges, ATMs, banking friction, stablecoin availability, plus P2P depth as a held-out bonus), regulation (may it stay: legal status, tax, income legality, identity friction, trajectory), spending rails (can it leave: gift cards, direct merchants, crypto cards, bills, connectivity), infrastructure (the digital preconditions: internet, smartphones, remittance corridors), and ecosystem (the human layer: events, media, sentiment, developers). Twenty-one sub-pillars sum to a capability score out of 84; one, P2P liquidity, is scored but held out of the total for statistical reasons explained in Chapter 2.

Every score reflects the state of the world on 31 December 2025, the report's hard cutoff, and passed a three-layer verification against primary sources, with every correction documented (Appendix A). The full dataset publishes alongside the report, the rankings regenerate from a published build script, and the limitations the authors know about are disclosed in Appendix A before anyone else finds them. To the authors' knowledge, no systematic country-level measurement of these conditions has been published before; the reader is invited to hold the work to the standard that claim implies.

What follows, then: why people live on crypto (Chapter 1), the index itself (Chapter 2), where crypto already pays (Chapter 3), the money that moves (Chapter 4), the rulebook (Chapter 5), and where the rules are heading (Chapter 6). Seventy-nine one-page country profiles, the full score tables, and the methodology close the volume.

Chapter 1 begins with the route most of the world takes into this behaviour: not choice, but need.

Notes

1. a16z crypto, *State of Crypto 2025* (2025), https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2025/. Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20260605130913/https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/state-of-crypto-report-2025/.