News 1 in 9 Indonesians Now Own Cryptocurrency, Report

About 11% of all Indonesians own some form of cryptocurrency, according to a recent report by Hootsuite, which cited GlobalWebIndex.

11% of Indonesians Own Cryptocurrency as Fiat Currency Devalues

With over 270 million people, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, and the fact that 1 out of 9 citizens own cryptocurrency demonstrates a rapidly expanding adoption level.

Indonesia is the sixth country by crypto adoption, only behind the Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and Nigeria. The Philippines leads the top with 17% of the population owning some cryptocurrency.

More Indonesians prefer to hold crypto as the national currency, Indonesian rupee (IDR), is gradually devaluing. It fell against the US dollar to the lowest since 1998 and might update the record low soon. Since the start of the year, USD/IDR surged by about 20%, which is really a lot for a fiat pair. Most of the losses have been suffered this month amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 11% figure is impressive considering that only about 64% of Indonesians have access to the internet from any device.

Is Data Accurate?

The report was discussed on Twitter, though not everyone agreed with the figures. Some locals said that it is highly unlikely that 11% of Indonesians own cryptocurrency, as the number is exaggerated.

Indonesian here. The numbers are pretty misleading i think, as they might take 2017 bull run into account for calculating the 11%. In actual, there are so many fake accounts who signed up to the largest crypto exchange back to 2017, just to receive an airdrop. # sud be below 0.5% — Douglas Tan (@DouglasTan30) March 23, 2020

The same report says that about 7% of the world population owns at least some Bitcoin or some of the altcoins. This means that more than 546 millions of people around the world own cryptocurrency. That figure is way higher than other estimations. For example, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes that there should be around 50 million crypto users worldwide.

A recent chart published by Statista shows that there were almost 45 million blockchain wallet users as of the last quarter of 2019.

Also, there are over 21 million Bitcoin wallets holding at least $1, according to BitInfoCharts data.

All in all, it’s true that Indonesia is at the front of cryptocurrency adoption.

Do you think that more than 27 million Indonesians own crypto? Share your thoughts in the comments section!

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