Now that we’ve looked at crypto within Venezuela and South America, let’s look at another place where crypto adoption is prominent: the Middle East.
As we can see, the Middle East holds about 7% of global cryptocurrency value (about $272B from last year), which shows that blockchain has a lot of applications within the region itself. Let’s break down this graph by specific countries within the Middle East to see where the majority of value is coming from.
It looks like Turkey holds the biggest portion of cryptocurrency value out of all the countries in the Middle East. However, I want to focus on the country with the second-largest value in the Middle East, Lebanon, as it’s very interesting to explore what is happening within the country itself.
What’s going on in Lebanon
Lebanon is a country that is facing a terrible economic collapse. The inflation rate in Lebanon is around 90%, an all-time high compared to many other countries. It’s especially terrible within the banking sector, as banks in Lebanon have been regulating how much people can withdraw from their own accounts (as well as who can withdraw). Citizens within Lebanon have been robbing banks just to get money out of their own account, which is interesting to say the least. As a result, banks have just completely shut down within the country.
Just like other countries (Venezuela) facing this problem, citizens of Lebanon have been turning to decentralized services within the country. There are even two physical Bitcoin ATMs in Al-Hamra that are able to convert cash into Bitcoin.
However, what’s unique about Lebanon is that they’ve experienced a rise in small-scale crypto mining operations. This usually happens in villages where renewable energy is affordable. One of the most prominent mining operations includes crypto mining from hydroelectric power in the Chouf mountains.
You can read more about how crypto mining has changed this local economy here.
Although profits can be quite erratic from these operations due to market performance, the ability to hold any sort of decentralized, external asset is valuable, especially due to the conditions that Lebanese citizens are facing. We can see that just like in other countries, crypto and DeFi have many applications in Lebanon and are actually helping them avert an economic crisis.