The TRIPLE A January 2023 crypto ownership country report noted that the number of cryptocurrency users has increased since January 2022. In January 2023 there were 420 million crypto owners globally; this is up from their previous report in January 2022 where they had stated there were 300 million crypto owners globally. In the Arab world biggest growth was seen in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, and even Iraq.
More interesting is that if we compare the percentage of crypto owners in the Arab world between January 2022 and January 2023 in some countries the increase is exponential.
For example in Jan 2022 2.38% of Moroccan population owned crypto, by January 2023 this number had increased to 4.9% an increase of more than 2% in one year. The same goes for Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon were the increase was also significant.
Country | Jan 2022 Crypto Ownership % | Jan 2023 crypto ownership % | Crypto Ownership Population 2023 |
Morocco | 2.38 | 4.9 | 1,794,827 |
Saudi Arabia | 1.3 | 1.6 | 592,351 |
Egypt | 1.75 | 3 | 3,098,736 |
UAE | 1.54 | NA | NA |
Jordan | 1.27 | 1.5 | 170,649 |
Kuwait | 1.12 | NA | NA |
Tunisia | 1.04 | 2.0 | 241,098 |
Lebanon | 1 | 2.4 | 185,704 |
Bahrain | 0.9 | 0.9 | 16,802 |
Qatar | 0.9 | 0.9 | 24,608 |
Oman | 0.9 | NA | |
Iraq | 0.9 | 1.8 | 700,935 |
Palestine | NA | 2.3 | 326,851 |
Algeria | NA | 2.2 | 1,016,105 |
Turkey | NA | 5.5 | 4,626,523 |
In another recent CoinGecko report, Lebanon placed first in the rankings as the country most interested in AI crypto, scoring the highest of 100 for almost all the search terms, resulting in a total score of 1,200. The 21.6% share in AI crypto search interest suggests that the Lebanese crypto community is keen to trade on trends like the pumping prices of AI tokens. Other Arab countries curious about crypto AI included UAE, followed by Kuwait and Qatar.
One can also go back to Chainalysis report in October 2022, where Middle East & North Africa (MENA) was the fastest growing region. MENA-based users received $566 billion in cryptocurrency from July 2021 to June 2022, 48% more than they received the year prior. The top three countries at that time were Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey. This is once again mirrored in the stats showcased in this article.