Poverty in the World and Crypto Adoption: What If We Crossed the Two?

First food, then morals. Brecht spoke of hunger, not blockchain, but the idea holds. The grand theories about who adopts Bitcoin often collapse when confronted with the numbers. The Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States this week, a statement that seemingly concerns no one at JDC. However, upon digging deeper, the question becomes significantly more interesting: intuition would suggest that crypto is adopted first where money is lacking, as a refuge for the poorest. Yet, the United States, the richest country in the world where poverty is declining, ranks second in the global crypto adoption list. Conversely, in South America, it is not the poorest who are adopting en masse, but those watching their national currency go up in smoke: in Argentina, it is stablecoins, not poverty, that do the heavy lifting. So, does crypto adoption really progress where poverty progresses? The answer is no, and that is precisely what makes it useful. Key points of this article:

• The Census Bureau reported a record median income in the United States for 2025, showing a decline in poverty.

• Despite an increase in poverty in France, the adoption of crypto assets remains lower than in countries less affected by poverty.

Where is Poverty, in the World and in France

Let’s start with the United States, as it is the starting point of the story. The Census Bureau published on September 15 a record median income of $87,460 for 2025, an increase of 2.6%, with the official poverty rate declining to 10.2%. A rich country that looks better on paper.

In France, the trend is the opposite: 15.4% monetary poverty rate in 2024, a record since 1996, with nearly 9.8 million people below the threshold of €1,337 per month. And yet, on the crypto side, France remains in the lower European average: the annual barometer from Adan published in April estimates that 11% of French people hold crypto assets, far behind the Netherlands (20%) or Germany (17%), two countries less affected by poverty. The first hint that the equation is not so simple.

Globally, the World Bank revised its estimate in March: 847 million people live below the extreme poverty line in 2024, which is 10.4% of the global population, a share that should drop back to 10% in 2026. About two-thirds of this extreme poverty is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. The only area where the trend is reversing: the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where the rate rose from 11.8% to 14.4% between the last two estimates, mainly due to new data from Pakistan. The complete ranking of the Henley Crypto Adoption Index 2026, which rates 36 countries on their regulatory and fiscal reception of cryptocurrencies. Source: Henley & Partners.

The Chainalysis Ranking, and the First Real Surprise

The contrast with the Henley ranking presented above is immediate. This index mixes real usage and regulatory or fiscal attractiveness, which structurally explains why financial hubs dominate the podium. Where Henley & Partners crowns the strongholds of finance, with regulatory welcome, soft taxation, and banking infrastructure, Chainalysis's Global Crypto Adoption Index 2025 measures something entirely different: real usage, weighted by GDP per capita in purchasing power parity to avoid reducing it to a ranking of gross volumes. And the result is at the opposite end: India tops the list for the second consecutive year, followed by the United States, then Pakistan, Vietnam, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ukraine, the Philippines, and Russia.

Here lies the very concrete paradox mentioned earlier: second in the global ranking, the United States is also the country with the record median income cited above. The richest country in the world and the country where poverty is declining occupies the second step of the crypto adoption podium. If a correlation between poverty and adoption existed, this paradox would not be the case.

The Real Common Factor: Currency Going Up in Smoke

The second thread promised in the introduction remains: if it is not wealth that explains adoption, it may be currency. Look in this direction and the picture becomes clearer. In Argentina, according to an analysis by a16z Crypto published on August 30 based on data from Artemis, 94% of the crypto trading volume denominated in pesos now goes through stablecoins, the highest share observed for a national currency. Argentine monthly inflation has dropped from 25.5% to 2.1% during this period. Usage, however, has not budged an inch: once trust in the peso is broken, it does not return in the first quarter of stability.

In Turkey, a KuCoin survey from May 2023 already found that 52% of Turkish adults were invested in cryptocurrencies, compared to four out of ten eighteen months earlier. During the same period, the Turkish lira lost more than 300% of its value between the end of 2020 and the end of 2023, with an average inflation exceeding 40% per year over five years.

In Nigeria, 40% of residents use crypto platforms for their international transfers, compared to an average of 11% globally according to the index published in June by Thunes and Juniper Research. The IMF openly expresses concern about this growing dependence on stablecoins. Massive use of dollar-pegged tokens can, according to the institution, weaken the demand for naira and the transmission of monetary policy, a phenomenon it qualifies as "digital dollarization". Three currencies in distress, three countries at or near the top of the Chainalysis ranking.

Why the Poorest Countries Are Not Included

The narrative of currency instability still leaves one anomaly aside. Two-thirds of the world's extreme poverty is found in Sub-Saharan Africa, and only Nigeria appears in the top 10 of Chainalysis. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, or Chad are among the poorest countries on the planet. None of the three weigh in the ranking.

The explanation lies less in willingness than in means. Holding crypto assets requires a smartphone, a reliable internet connection, and access, even informal, to an exchange platform. Connectivity sorts out what mere poverty does not: Nigeria, both poor and connected (over 220 million inhabitants, one of the highest mobile penetration rates on the continent), ticks both boxes. Landlocked countries or those poorly equipped with digital infrastructure do not.

It is therefore not enough to be poor to adopt crypto. One must be poor, in addition to being wary of their currency, and have a technical means to act on this distrust. The United States meets the third condition without the first two, while Argentina, Turkey, and Nigeria meet all three. American poverty is declining, and Bitcoin has nothing to do with it; meanwhile, monetary distrust in Argentina, Turkey, or Nigeria is increasing, and Bitcoin, or rather stablecoins, directly benefit from this. The loss of confidence in a currency that can still be exchanged for something else pushes people towards crypto. Poverty alone is never sufficient.