Crypto transaction activity does not scale with national wealth, but how people use crypto does.

The Bybit World Crypto Adoption Index breaks down transactional activity into:

1️⃣ CEX value received
2️⃣ DeFi value received
3️⃣ Lightning network metrics (capacity, node & channel count)
4️⃣ Crypto payment traffic & card volume
5️⃣ Stablecoin flows
6️⃣ P2P web traffic

Plotted against GDP per capita, these metrics tell very different stories about why crypto is used around the world.
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CEX and DeFi traffic are heavily concentrated in high-GDP countries.

These platforms offer structured financial exposure, which aligns with markets that have higher disposable income, stronger financial literacy, and clearer regulatory access.

In wealthier economies, crypto is treated mainly as a financial instrument. In lower-GDP countries, CEX and DeFi traffic drops sharply.
This does not mean crypto adoption is low. It means crypto is not primarily used for investment.

Usage shifts toward remittances, savings via stablecoins, and everyday value transfer, often through mobile-first or lightweight tools rather than browser-based platforms.
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Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic does not follow GDP patterns.
Usage appears across the income spectrum and is shaped more by local infrastructure frictions than national wealth.

🇰🇪Kenya stands out, with exceptionally high P2P activity, reflecting mobile money familiarity and crypto’s role in domestic and cross-border transfers.

Meanwhile, crypto banking and payment platforms are almost entirely concentrated in high-GDP countries.

These services rely on regulation, compliance, cards, and off-ramps that integrate tightly with traditional finance. Their adoption reflects a more formal and embedded crypto experience.

Low-GDP markets show little engagement here, despite strong stablecoin usage elsewhere.
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The takeaway is not that some countries “use crypto more” than others; they use it for very different reasons.

High-GDP markets lean toward investment, structured products, and regulated platforms.
Lower- and middle-income markets lean toward utility: remittances, savings, and access.

🔗All this and more in the Bybit World Crypto Adoption Index report.

Gone are the days in DeFi when factors like gas prices or AMM design determined transaction execution.

Taking a few pages from Wall Street, order flow visibility, routing, and settlement now define fairness and access onchain.

But did DeFi improve on its predecessors?

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By 2025, Ethereum operated a dual-track execution system. Public mempools still dominated transaction count, but private routing captured most economically sensitive flow.

Large swaps, liquidations, and arbitrage increasingly bypassed the public mempool, entering through private relays, RFQs, and solver-mediated pipelines.

A heavy structural shift, MEV-Boost intermediated roughly 90–95% of Ethereum block production throughout the year, confirming that permissioned builder pipelines are now the dominant inclusion path.

In parallel, private mempool usage rose to ~35–45% of daily transactions, up from low-teens levels in early 2024.

Public mempools remain the default for retail and permissionless submissions, but private systems dominate MEV-dense and priority order flow. Access to routing infrastructure now matters more than gas bidding when competing for high-value execution, reshaping who can participate in the most profitable segments of blockspace.

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Elsewhere, solver-mediated execution matured into an industrial clearing layer on Ethereum.

On CoWSwap V3, a small group of solvers consistently cleared the majority of trades and batches, with leadership stabilising in the second half of the year as long-tail participation declined.

RFQ liquidity became even more centralised. Two market makers filled nearly 90% of RFQ flow, with price discovery concentrated in USDC, ETH, USDT, and BTC.

Public AMMs continued to serve retail and long-tail assets, but most economically significant flow moved into private, solver-routed channels. Execution quality improved, while control over pricing and flow narrowed to a small institutional layer.

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The second half of 2025 resurrected one of DeFi's founding principles: privacy.

As execution and routing moved into private channels, demand for selective disclosure increased.

Zcash regained mindshare with a blend of retail speculation and heightened awareness surrounding compliance-compatible privacy. While total transactions declined, shielded usage more than doubled, reaching ~19% of activity.

Usage consolidated almost entirely into the Orchard shielded pool, which surpassed 4.1m ZEC in shielded supply. View keys preserved auditability, allowing Zcash to remain supported by exchanges and custodians.

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An important takeaway from 2025: MEV, private routing, and dark execution are now framed as market-integrity and conflicts-of-interest issues by regulators.

🇪🇺 EU → ESMA analysis explicitly treated MEV as a value transfer from users to intermediaries, often without user awareness and drawing parallels to illegal front-running in TradFi.

🇺🇸 USA → Still no crypto-specific best-execution standard, but routing, transaction ordering, and MEV-related conduct are being examined through enforcement actions and supervisory reviews.

🇬🇧 UK → The FCA’s 2025 consultations focused on authorisation, custody, market abuse, and systems-and-controls obligations, stopping short of any best-execution rules.

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The challenge ahead is balance.

Unchecked private execution risks recreating markets where retail never sees the best price. Blindly copying traditional market structure risks importing the same opacity and gatekeeping DeFi set out to escape.

Where that line is drawn will determine whether onchain markets remain open systems or dissipate into smoke-and-mirrors-style closed execution clubs.

This is the State of DeFi.

Which countries have successfully adopted crypto? Let's rank 'em with the Bybit World Crypto Adoption Index:

🥇 Singapore 🇸🇬
🥈 USA 🇺🇸
🥉 Lithuania 🇱🇹
4. Switzerland 🇨🇭
5. UAE 🇦🇪
6. Ireland 🇮🇪
7. Canada 🇨🇦
8. Netherlands 🇳🇱
9. Estonia 🇪🇪
10. Vietnam 🇻🇳

Who's been left behind?

69. Dominican Republic 🇩🇴
70. Trinidad & Tobago 🇹🇹
71. Senegal 🇸🇳
72. Zimbabwe 🇿🇼
73. Panama 🇵🇦
74. Qatar 🇶🇦
75. Iran 🇮🇷
76. Azerbijan 🇦🇿
77. Mongolia 🇲🇳
78. Rwanda 🇷🇼
79. Lebanon 🇱🇧

Don't fret, there's still time. DeFi will inevitably win.

"Who are you to decide?" you ask. Well, the truth is we're just a bunch of llamas. 🦙

But Bybit asked us for a little help figuring it out, and we happen to have some bright minds on staff who helped design the Crypto Adoption Index.

The index & report are much more than a list of countries.
It shows where adoption is driven by policy, where it grows out of necessity, and where stablecoins, P2P rails, or regulated platforms become part of everyday financial life.

These rankings may catch your eye, but the details of the report are what explain the world behind them.

Consider this a quick lesson in global crypto culture. Expand your worldview by reading the full Bybit World Crypto Rankings report.

In 2025, DeFi's mask came off.

Airdrops proved to be less about decentralising.
DAOs shed their collective image as level playing fields

And beneath it all, through good and bad, fascinating narratives formed.

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Airdrops remained the dominant distribution mechanism in 2025, but onchain data make one thing crystal-clear: they were not instruments of economic decentralisation.

Across major campaigns, recipient counts routinely reached into the tens of thousands. Yet ownership consolidated immediately:
🪂 With Aster, the top 10% captured 95.5% of supply while the bottom half received just 0.2%
🪂 Kaito followed a similar pattern, with 93.1% held by the top decile and a median allocation barely above dust
🪂 Even flatter distributions like Monad still delivered ~70% of supply to the top 10%.

The mass-participation era of airdrops is over, and recipient count has become a poor proxy for economic decentralisation.

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While 2024 represented a high-water mark for DAO proposal activity and experimental governance frameworks, 2025 marked a clear transition toward consolidation, professionalisation, and delegate-driven control.

Across major DAOs, proposal volume collapsed by 60–90% year over year while median voter counts fell almost everywhere. Yet the voting power deployed per proposal held steady or increased.

🔑 Decision-making migrated toward a small cohort of professional delegates, large liquidity providers, and protocol-aligned funds.
🔑 Effective influence per voter rose sharply, even as raw participation declined.

Day by day, governance continues to evolve (or devolve) away from Vitalik's DAO ideals.

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DAO treasuries in 2025 became both highly concentrated and structurally divided.

Among those large treasuries, two models clearly emerged:

1️⃣ Native-token–heavy treasuries
2️⃣ Diversified operating treasuries

Today, treasury composition mattered as much as size: the DAOs best positioned for 2026 are the ones that have already reduced reliance on native token price to fund operations.

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Economic design in DeFi changed meaningfully in 2025.

For the first time, protocol revenue and tokenholder outcomes began to converge—unevenly, and only in parts of the market, but decisively enough to mark a break from prior cycles.

The shift was highly category-dependent:
🥇 Chains routed nearly all revenue to validators and stakers
🥈 Derivatives and CDPs adopted explicit, high-distribution models
🥉 DEXs improved materially
🏅 Lending and liquid staking largely retained the zero-payout structure of earlier cycles

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This is the State of DeFi: covering stablecoin safety, revenue distribution, trading infrastructure, credit and RWAs, the L1/L2 scene, privacy & execution, digital asset treasuries, and more.