The top 20 countries with the highest interest in cryptocurrency account for nearly 75 per cent of the total traffic to cryptocurrency exchanges, while the other 165 countries only account for 25.26%. Among them, the U.S. is the top source of traffic to crypto exchanges, according to a report from OKEx.

The research by a senior researcher named Lora Kong with OKEx has analyzed the traffic changes of the 53 most frequently used cryptocurrency exchanges across 185 countries. By looking at the traffic on cryptocurrency exchanges in different countries, it presents which countries are trading cryptocurrencies the most, and offers an insight of which countries are their priority destination when a crypto exchange plans overseas expansion.

Data shows that the traffic from the top 20 countries accounts for 74.74% of the total, while the other 165 countries only account for 25.26%. The highest traffic on crypto exchanges is coming from the U.S., accounting for 14.2% of the total traffic; Russia trailed with 7.4%, and Brazil (6.1%), Turkey (5.4%) and China (5.1%) rounded out the top five.

However, the report points out that the traffic from China is likely to be higher than the U.S., as the trading volume via apps by Chinese traders is four times that on the web (data in the report is mainly based on web traffic) for Chinese preference for mobile apps in trading.

As per the result, countries such as the U.S., Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Japan, Ukraine, Poland, Thailand, South Korea, Mexico and Australia have high cryptocurrency interest. While existing local exchanges in these countries have been dominant, the barriers to entry are thus very high, especially in Japan and South Korea, where almost all of their local exchanges’ traffic comes from residents there.

In contrast, countries including the UK, Vietnam, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Canada have strong trading demand, but lack of strong local exchanges, which could make them the focus of exchanges’ overseas market expansion.

Apart from those rich countries that have the high crypto interest, South American countries represented by Venezuela and Argentina, and some African countries like Sudan and Nigeria, also show high demand for cryptocurrencies despite low trading volume. The report points out that traders in these regions tend to trade cryptocurrencies via OTC (over the counter) transactions to hedge risks as a result of their unstable fiat system and high inflation there.