Americans made a cool $4 billion in Bitcoin in 2020

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It’s no secret that there have been some big winners (and losers) in the Bitcoin space. In 2020, the cryptocurrency skyrocketed from around $6,000 at the beginning of the year to nearly $30,000 in December. But when it comes to breaking it down by country, who did the best?

Well according to data from Chainalysis, US Bitcoin supporters came out on top, followed by China and Japan. In the US, an estimated $4.1 billion was made off of crypto exchanges. In China, the number is quite lower, at $1.1 billion. In third, people in Japan right under a billion, at $900 million.

So, with Bitcoin being decentralized using anonymous wallets, how did Chainalysis come to this conclusion? Essentially, they used on-chain flows from different exchanges to come up with a dollar amount and then used web traffic flow from each of the countries to come up with a number.

It’s important to note these numbers only account for Bitcoin withdrawn from these exchanges, Bitcoin that is still held in these places isn’t accounting for, meaning the numbers are most likely quite higher across the board. Another important note is these numbers are based on US-based exchanges, so keep that in mind when looking at the data.

It will be interesting to see not only what 2021 holds, but also the future, as things like Ethereum are starting to be highlighted more as its blockchain is more flexible than Bitcoin, allowing for more applications and coins to be built off the ERC20 protocol.

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