Despite strongly fluctuating exchange rates and the ongoing discussion about the sustainability of the large blockchains behind Bitcoin and Ethereum, 2021 was a successful year for crypto investors. U.S.-based crypto holders alone were able to generate $47 billion from trading Bitcoin and Co. last year. As our chart based on an estimate by Chainalysis shows, the world's largest economies are also among those whose residents have benefited the most from the crypto boom.
With estimated profits of $8.2 billion, $5.8 billion, and $5.8 billion, respectively, countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan are still in a different league than the United States though. Chinese investors also made the top 5 with estimated annual gains of $5.1 billion. However, that is likely to change this year: At the end of September 2021, the People's Bank of China banned all trading in and mining of cryptocurrencies.
Russia on the other hand, which is currently still in seventh place with $4.3 billion in profits, could benefit from the current sanctions due to its war against Ukraine. While its central bank was still planning to ban trading with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies at the beginning of the year, the government wants to rely more on corresponding means of payment in the future in order to circumvent international sanctions. In Europe, too, financial institutions and lawmakers are concerned with Bitcoin: According to reporting by German platform Netzpolitik, the EU is planning to ban Bitcoin mining and trading with corresponding currencies, not least because of Bitcoin's enormous energy requirements.
According to the analysts at Chainalysis, it is almost impossible to precisely specify the profits generated by trading in cryptocurrencies for individual investors or wallets due to the decentralized nature of the blockchain. Due to this, the transaction data of the observed crypto exchanges was analyzed to determine the estimated values, converted to U.S. dollars, and attributed as a percentage to the web traffic of the countries that accessed said crypto exchanges. According to this model, a total of around $163 billion in gains was generated from cryptocurrency trading in 2021, $130 billion more than in 2020.
