Recently Recap, a crypto tracking and capital gains solution provider, published its report under the title ‘Which Cities are leading the way in cryptocurrency’. 50 cities were put in the report.
As per the report Recap scored these cities based on the following criteria. The first was quality of life score; personally I don’t see how crypto is related to quality of life. For me the most popular crypto enthusiasts and users are usually from cities and countries which have the most unbanked population or live in countries where the financial and economic situation is not that impressive. Examples include Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and others, all by the way not even mentioned in the report.
Their second criterion was crypto specific events! Wow this was a first for me, so if a city carries out a lot of crypto events then automatically it becomes a city leading the way in cryptocurrency. This was actually one of the biggest reasons Kuwait was put on the list, coming in at 16th place, because it had 64 crypto related events!! The funniest thing is that UAE was mentioned as only having 20 crypto events! I mean who are we kidding, even CZ from Binance tweeted the other day that UAE has a crypto event every day! This means that there are 365 crypto events in UAE not 20. Both stretch the truth a bit, but all can agree that the number of blockchain and crypto events in UAE definitely surpass that of Kuwait.
But please let’s not stop there, the third criteria was people working in crypto related jobs! I really don’t know how they even reached that number, but let’s dig into their numbers, so first they mention that London in the UK has the most crypto related job over 2000, while Dubai in UAE has 869 to be exact! But Japan top three crypto cities only have a total of 14 people working in crypto jobs! I mean seriously! While Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has 24 people working in crypto related jobs and believe it or not Kuwait city has 7!
Can someone tell me where is Bahrain in all of this? Bahrain which has Binance, CoinMENA, Rain, crypto payments and an ATM or two? Bahrain were crypto growth has skyrocketed.
Even If were naïve enough to believe this, given that both Kuwait and KSA have not even started to regulate crypto how is that possible, and how can Japan which was considered one of the most advanced countries in crypto and blockchain only 14 people working in crypto in its top three cities?!
But Alas comes the number of crypto companies. So please bear with me. In Dubai UAE, there are 867 people working in crypto related jobs and there are 772 crypto companies in Dubai UAE. Amazingly that would mean that there is almost 1.2 employees working across these 772 crypto companies. Even UAE Based crypto Oasis has calculated that there are 1,600 blockchain and crypto related entities in the UAE.
Skipping down to the most interesting part, the ownership of crypto in each country,. According to Recap 34 percent of the population living in UAE own crypto, how is that possible when UAE was the number third country in MENA in terms of crypto movement into the country as per Chainalysis. What’s even funnier is Kuwait which took 16th position beating KSA, Recap has 0 percent of people owning crypto in Kuwait! You read it right zero percent of people in Kuwait own crypto but they all go to the 65 crypto events happening in the Kuwait city! Surprisingly Saudi Arabia has 20 percent ownership of crypto among its population but comes in at number 22!
Anyhow I will stop here. To go any further with analyzing their data would be a waste of time! I am not contending that Dubai is not the number two city in the world leading crypto, but I would not use Recap report to make that point! The whole report is nonsensical.
But what really bothers me, is that a lot of media actually published and picked up this report and used their data. Where is the world coming to?!
