Where in the world is blockchain?

This information was first published on August 6, 2026, as a special Data Dive feature in Issue 02 of babsNYC.news.

A special feature by guest contributor Sarah Jane Hager, Data Analyst and Quant Strategist

It’s been a tough year in blockchain. Bitcoin is down, deal activity is low, and the only tech anyone seems to be able to talk about these days is AI. But even though 2026 has been a bear year so far, movement is beginning to pick back up again.

The realization that institutions are increasingly using blockchains, stablecoins, and smart contracts to support their operations is hitting the mainstream. Also, Augustus is in the news, armed with an OCC national bank charter, as a crypto clearing bank for the AI age.

So at this mid-bounce point, I thought we should take stock of the space and ask a question: “Where in the world is the blockchain industry?”

The industry

We took the market cap of major blockchain companies and divided it by the GDP of their headquarter cities to identify major industry hubs across the globe.

Obviously, San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, dominates this metric. El Salvador has an extremely friendly regulatory environment, so much so that Tether decided to move its headquarters there in 2025. Taking them out of the ranking, the picture becomes a little clearer. 

Dubai and the San Francisco Bay Area come out as relatively large industry hubs. NYC is also able to pull some major players, but remains dominated by many other industries, especially in TradFi. This also makes sense with the regulatory environment in New York State. In 2015, it began to require all cryptocurrency companies to acquire a BitLicense to operate in the state. This move even drove out Kraken, the world's largest crypto asset exchange. The impact of the BitLicense will also impact other areas of this analysis.

Miami also holds a notable ratio in the dataset of >1%. The city is known culturally as more of an industry hub. Many TradFi players, such as Citadel, are headquartered there, with major digital asset trading teams in the city, and social media has convinced me there’s a big crypto bro scene there. It’s possible that, as time passes, there will be a higher market cap concentration as well.

The consumers

We studied the ratio of local population to crypto ATMs as a proxy for local consumer demand for crypto products both internationally and within the US. The data sourced from coinatmradar.com, a site that uses a combination of research and crowdsourced data to map these installations across the globe, and their blogging activity suggests the website is actively maintained to this day.

There are likely some examples of over- or under-reporting of machines due to the crowdsourced nature of the information, but it’s a useful exercise nonetheless as a proxy for understanding how people may use digital currencies in their daily lives.

Globally, these are the top 10 countries with the highest rates of Crypto ATM installation relative to population.

Canada, Australia, and the US are the top three in terms of raw number of Crypto ATMs and also relative to total population. El Salvador is obviously also in the top 10, while some Eastern European states fill out the rest of the ranking. 

Note: Countries with 5 or fewer Crypto ATMs were filtered out as their infrastructure is not seen as a meaningful statistic.

Domestically, the pattern is more interesting. This chart shows the top 10 US Cities by population as well as their adoption ratio.

This shows how consumer ATM density varies significantly in major US cities, with Dallas, TX at an extremely high density adoption ratio while San Antonio, a major city in the same state, sees much lower infrastructure installed to support consumer demand. On average, major US cities have an average crypto ATM density of around 1 per 5,000 people, a significant amount of infrastructure.

Notably missing from this chart is New York City. After the BitLicense requirement was created in 2015, there was only one company ATM operator that appears to have received the license, Coinsource. This company voluntarily surrendered its license in 2023, and there doesn’t seem to be any other licensed ATM operators in this state at this time. All this to say, there definitely are still crypto ATMs in the state (I’m sure you’ve seen them around), but they’re all either illegal or out of operation. So there is technically none.

Further down we can see a more interesting breakdown. These are the 10 US cities with the largest raw number of crypto ATMs that were not included in the previous list. As you can see, the reported density is pretty extreme. 

Some of these in South Florida, a known crypto hub, are pretty logical. Others, however, such as Richmond, Norfolk, Harrisburg, and Bedford, make less sense at first glance. The source uses self-reported information, so it’s likely there’s an overcount in some of these smaller towns, or that the crypto ATMs are actually housed in the surrounding areas instead of confined within this locale.

For Bedford, OH, specifically, this number is likely also inclusive of ATMs in the surrounding suburban areas of Cleveland. That being said, a quick Google search reveals a genuinely surprising amount of crypto ATMs in the small town of ~12,000 and across suburban Cleveland. 

This could be caused by a few factors. First, the regulatory environment in Ohio is increasingly friendly to cryptocurrency operators. Second, the state is a major transit hub with large amounts of goods and people constantly passing through the city.

One theory is that large, unbanked migrant populations who use stablecoins or other digital currencies to send money home have created demand for this infrastructure. Truckers, local businessmen, farmers, and other manufacturers may also have some use for the currency in paying suppliers or receiving payments from consumers. Determining the precise factors, however, would require further study.

But, yeah - Bedford, Ohio. Major cryptocurrency hub. Who knew?

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