A new Cornell University study covering 25,880 respondents in 25 countries ranked El Salvador, Venezuela and Nigeria as the places where the largest shares of people said they had ever owned bitcoin, Bitcoinmagazine reported.
The report is titled the Bitcoin Adoption Index. Its central finding was that ownership concentrated not in wealthy financial centers but in economies with unstable national currencies and difficult access to dollars or dependable banking, where the authors said bitcoin operates more as a practical workaround than a speculative position.
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Key facts
- Researchers interviewed 25,880 people in 25 countries between December 16, 2024 and March 10, 2025, asking 125 individual questions.
- Fieldwork was carried out by Morning Consult with the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, the Cornell Bitcoin Club, the Human Rights Foundation and the Reynolds Foundation.
- The report’s top-ranked countries by share of respondents who had ever owned bitcoin were El Salvador, Venezuela and Nigeria.
- 58% of respondents did not know that only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist.
Ella Hough, a Bitcoin advocacy associate at Strategy and a junior fellow at Cornell’s Brooks School Tech Policy Institute, said the technology behaves consistently while the motivation to use it varies by market. She said the survey, spanning 25 countries, showed that people were more likely to treat bitcoin as a route to financial freedom where currencies were weak, banking access was constrained or monetary controls were tighter.
The index also indicated that many holders understand little about how the network functions, even while using it. A Venezuelan respondent, who was not identified in the report, described bitcoin as faster, cleaner and much less risky than other routes to obtaining dollars locally. A Salvadoran respondent framed the absence of a single controlling party as a form of shared control, and a Nigerian interviewee said travel across six African countries had been possible without concern because bitcoin could be spent along the way.
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Why it matters
The results give survey-level evidence for a pattern that has been visible in local markets for years: in Venezuela, hyperinflation and currency controls made dollars scarce, while El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender alongside the dollar in 2021 and Nigeria saw some savers turn to bitcoin as the naira weakened. Cornell’s data adds a cross-country comparison to those individual cases, separating places that use bitcoin out of need from places that use it out of interest. It also puts a number on a knowledge gap — a majority of respondents could not state the 21 million supply cap — that shapes how policymakers and educators may approach the asset.
What to watch
The report does not set a date for follow-up fieldwork. The next signal will be whether Cornell and its partners repeat the index on a regular schedule, which would let observers track whether adoption shares in the leading countries rise, hold or reverse.
Source: Bitcoin Magazine
