Most full-time employees of the cryptocurrency industry are employed by companies based in Asia-Pacific, followed closely by North America – specifically the US – says a new Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance that was distributed in Chinese by 8btc.com.



The study is the inaugural research focused on alternative payment systems and digital assets and the first of its kind to holistically examine the burgeoning global cryptocurrency industry and its key constituents, which include exchanges, wallets, payments and mining.

The academic research which is supported by Visa notes that at least 1,876 people are working full-time in the cryptocurrency industry, and the actual total figure is likely well above two thousand when large mining organisations and other organizations that did not provide headcount figures are added. It records that Asia have 720 of the total number of employees while North America has 676 while Europe has 346.

Situated in the University of Cambridge, the Centre reports that though 37% of all exchanges are based in Europe, the total number of employees at European exchanges is considerably less than the total headcount at companies based in Asia-Pacific where almost 60% of large exchanges are based.

It points out that 85% of all exchanges based in Asia-Pacific do not have a license unlike 78% of North American-based exchanges that hold a formal government license or authorisation or 47% and 43% of European and Latin American-based exchanges respectively.

It adds that not having a formal license, however, does not necessarily mean that the exchanges are not regulated, as appears to be the case now with many of the China-based exchanges.

Companies surveyed have 21 full-time employees on average. The median number of employees is nine with study partcipants based in North America having the highest median number of employees (12), whereas participants from Africa and the Middle East as well as from Europe have the

lowest (seven).

Other related highlights of the study includes that while reported trading in the Chinese Renminbi (CNY) appeared to represent an often significant majority of global bitcoin trading volumes from 2014 to 2016 (ranging from 50% to 90%), bitcoin trading denominated in CNY has plummeted in early 2017 after the tightening of regulation by the People’s Bank of China.

It puts the estimated number of unique active users of cryptocurrency wallets as having grown since 2013 to between 2.9 million and 5.8 million as at the time of releasing the report with between 5.8 million and 11.5 million wallets estimated to be currently active. In all, it gave a combined market capitalisation (i.e., market price multiplied by the number of existing currency units) of all cryptocurrencies as having increased by more than threefold since early 2016 and has reached $27 billion in April 2017.

The study was based on the collection of non-public data from nearly 150 companies and individuals covering 38 countries from five world regions. Four online surveys were conducted between September 2016 and January 2017 via secure web-based questionnaires to get the result.

See link to the full report below: http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/centres/alternative-finance/downloads/2017-global-cryptocurrency-benchmarking-study.pdf