Cryptocurrency peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions have become very commonplace, particularly in areas where it is usually not possible to buy and sell crypto assets in any other way. With that in mind, Africa has recently managed to surpass North America in terms of Bitcoin (BTC) P2P trading volumes, and with this development, Africa now has the biggest peer-to-peer BTC trading volume in the whole world.
The overall amount of BTC being held for six months to a year skyrocketed to reach 3.2 million tokens.
North America falls as Africa rises
A ‘Redditor’ had recently uploaded a diagram that displayed a sharp increase in BTC trading volumes for nations present in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. These trading volume levels have now gone considerably higher than those of North America, which is surprising as Africa is much worse-off in several key socio-economic areas as compared to the Americans.
The aforementioned diagram demonstrated that these South African nations have indeed taken the lead regarding P2P trading volumes for the flagship cryptocurrency. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa has managed to exceed North America by an approximate amount of $17 million.
Furthermore, the diagram also showed that the Asia Pacific area had ranked 3rd, whereas Latin America ranked 4th. After that, we can see Eastern and Western Europe, followed by the inclusion of the Middle East and lastly, the countries in North Africa. The main reason for the massive trading volumes in Sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of a basic, successful financial and economic infrastructure along with the horrible living standards and ridiculously high inflation. Most of the Sub-Saharan Africans do not have access to any kind of banking services either, thereby adding even more incentive to use P2P trading as many believe that Bitcoin can help where traditional financial institutions have failed.
Early investors are still holding BTC
The BTC tokens stored in various wallets in a 6-12 month timeframe within the past four months were seen to have experienced a drastic spike which resulted in the BTC skyrocketing to 3.2 million from 1.4 million. To put it another way, this is equivalent to a ridiculous $158,039,680,000 at today’s Bitcoin exchange rates. Needless to say, that is a lot of money being moved around, and many are actively choosing to ‘hold Bitcoin.
In related news, the total amount of BTC which had been moved between numerous centralized exchanges (CEXs) had reached the same levels as 17 months ago, which was a time when the event referred to as ‘Black Thursday’ occurred.
