Ukraine ranks 7th for crypto adoption, and its two best scores are transfers

Ukraine sits seventh out of 117 countries in the crypto adoption index Chainalysis published on 23 September, ahead of Thailand, South Africa and Canada. The ranking covers July 2025 to June 2026. Ukraine's two strongest scores landed in the categories that track money moving between people, and this year the index counts different things than it did last year.

Ukraine's four crypto adoption scores

• Domestic peer-to-peer economy: 6th
• Cross-border transfers: 6th
• Service inflows: 8th
• Balances: 8th

A peer-to-peer trade means two people settling with each other: they agree a rate, one sends a card payment, the other releases the coins, with no exchange standing in the middle of the settlement. Cross-border flows are the same thing across a border. For a country with a large diaspora and a lot of income earned abroad, those two columns describe errands rather than speculation: send money home, receive a payment, hold the balance in something that does not sit in a local bank.

No category below eighth. Chainalysis takes the geometric mean of a country's four ranks, so evenness counts for more than dominance in one column. Brazil took first place without topping a single subcategory: second in cross-border flows, third in service flows, third in domestic P2P and fourth in balances, on more than $252 billion of crypto activity, Cryptobriefing reported. Every one of those beats Ukraine's equivalent.

The index measures something different this year

Chainalysis rebuilt the sub-indices for this seventh edition. Last year it ranked countries on value held at centralized services, retail transactions under $10,000, DeFi activity and institutional transactions above $1 million. This year it counts service inflows, domestic peer-to-peer transfers, cross-border transfers and balances. Chainalysis dropped DeFi and institutional flows and added the person-to-person and cross-border columns, which are the two where Ukraine placed sixth.

The new metrics shook up the rest of the table too. Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Russia all sat in last year's top ten and none of them appears in this one. Japan, South Korea, Thailand, South Africa and Canada took those five slots.

The year-on-year move, read two ways

Ukraine ranked fifth in 2023, sixth in 2024, eighth in 2025 and seventh now. The 2025 edition covered 151 countries against 117 this time. Eighth of 151 puts a country in the top 5.3% of the field; seventh of 117 is the top 6.0%. By rank Ukraine climbed a position. By share of the field it slipped. Both readings hold, and neither means much across a change of method.

“Activity has become consistent, routed through wallets in a steady rhythm rather than in bursts”

— Philip Gradwell, vice president of economics at Tether, 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, Chainalysis

Quote source: Chainalysis, 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, 23 September 2026.

For context we looked in July at Ukraine sitting among the world's largest crypto markets and at FATF pressure on how the country writes its rules.

Read the next edition for what Chainalysis decided to count, then for what Ukrainians did with crypto. For this one the picture holds: a country whose crypto use runs through transfers between people and across borders, in a year when prices fell.

Nothing here is financial advice, only information to consider.