Cryptocurrency ownership has been steadily increasing since Satoshi Nakamoto published the industry-leading Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. With more than half a billion crypto users worldwide, adoption is now expected to continue to rise over the next five years, according to a survey by Binance.

The vast majority of cryptocurrency users surveyed in Latin America (95%) believe that the number of users will grow in the next five years. For 3.6%, the number of users will remain fairly stable, and only 0.6% expect a decrease, according to the survey of 10,000 users in the region.

By the end of 2023, around 562 million people around the world owned some form of digital currency, equivalent to 6.8% of the world’s population. That’s a 33% increase over the 420 million users who were registered at the end of 2022, according to Triple-A’s “The State of Global Cryptocurrency Ownership in 2024” report. South America alone had 55.2 million users at the end of last year, an impressive 116% increase over the previous year — the largest increase of any region.

New retail and institutional users have been attracted by the rise of cryptocurrency use cases, such as payments, that build the bridge to real life. Binance Pay, for example, saw a 61% increase in active users and transaction volume last year in Latin America, and over 105% in transaction count.

At the same time, ETF approvals for Bitcoin and Ether, now traded in countries including the US, Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and others, are attracting a new influx of institutional investors as the range of investment assets expands and becomes more similar to that of traditional finance.

“Cryptocurrencies have definitely been bridging the ‘chasm’ or adoption gap that exists between early and mainstream markets as Binance and others continue to develop new real-life use cases with easy-to-use apps and products. Payments are the most obvious use case, but there are many more, such as money transfer tools or NFTs with real-world rewards and experiences. People are connected to their mobile phones and expect to have the best services 24x7 in the palm of their hands, and cryptocurrencies deliver on that desire,” says Guilherme Nazar, Regional Vice President of Binance for Latin America.

Changes in prices

The survey also indicates that 86% of users in Latin America expect prices to increase by the end of the year, while 9.7% expect stability, and 3.5% are more pessimistic and predict a drop.

Despite recent market volatility, the top cryptocurrencies by market cap are all in positive territory so far this year. BTC, the largest, has gained 39.26% year-to-date, while ETH is up 15.61%, BNB is up 64.73% and Solana is up 43.56%, according to CoinMarketCap data as of today.

The Binance Latin America survey was designed to understand Latin Americans’ perceptions of cryptocurrencies and the Web3 ecosystem, and to delve deeper into usage habits. It also aims to show users’ expectations for the market in the coming years.

In this first edition of the survey, Binance combined responses from 10,000 users from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico on questions ranging from investment and market behavior to pricing and adoption expectations.