Need doesn't build infrastructure. That is the plainest finding in our Crypto Livability Index. It took us a while to say it without softening it.
The common assumption runs the other way. If a country has fast inflation, a weak banking system and a lot of money arriving from abroad, crypto should already be how people live there. In some places it is. Argentina is first in the index and El Salvador is second. But the bottom of the table is full of countries with just as much reason to run on crypto. They can't.
Where the assumption breaks
The index ranks 79 countries two ways. The rails ranking scores raw capability out of 84: exchanges, cards, legal clarity, infrastructure. The livability ranking is the headline one. It takes the same scores and weights them by need, meaning inflation, the share of adults without a bank account, remittances, capital controls and sanctions. The weighting multiplies. Need can lift a country. It can't rescue one whose rails are broken, because a huge need times almost no usable infrastructure is still close to nothing.
Cuba is the clearest case. Its need score is 0.81, the highest of the 79 (Genghis Research, 2026). Inflation averaged 80 percent, remittances are an estimated 12 percent of GDP and the financial system is under sanctions. The unbanked share has no reliable data, so the report estimates it at roughly two-thirds. Its rails score is 32 out of 84. It lands tenth on livability, not first. No amount of need moves it higher.
Four countries, one pattern
Nepal takes in 26.2 percent of its GDP as remittances, more than El Salvador's 24.0 percent. Its rails score is 15 and it is last of 79 on the rails ranking, which puts it 76th on livability. Peer-to-peer trading, the usual way into crypto when there is no local exchange, is suppressed there. The Nepal page in the index has the full scoreboard.
Myanmar looks different. About 77 percent of adults are unbanked on our estimate and inflation averaged 25.8 percent. People do use USDT there, through Telegram and in cash. But enforcement risk and tightening currency controls hold the rails score to 16. The country finishes 73rd.
Iraq is not a currency story at all. Inflation averaged 2.4 percent. The problem is access: around 70 percent of adults are unbanked and capital controls are heavy. Trading exists, mostly in person and in small volumes. The rails score is 15 and Iraq is 78th.
Put the four together and the pattern is hard to miss. The ceiling is set less by how badly people need an alternative than by whether anyone has built the last mile where they live.
Is ranking by need alone wrong?
People ask why we don't simply rank by need. Try it. Cuba, Lebanon and Venezuela would lead. The table would tell a person trying to pay a phone bill nothing useful about their week. Rank by capability alone and Switzerland wins, in a country where few people depend on crypto at all. Multiplying the two says a place is livable on crypto only when the need and the means show up together.
We run Genghis, a store where you pay with crypto, so the spending side is what we look at first. A country can be easy to hold crypto in and still have nowhere to spend it. The index has a page for each of the 79 countries. The bottom of the table is where the biggest unserved populations sit.
A caveat on the numbers. Several inputs for these countries are estimates, including Cuba's unbanked share and remittances and Myanmar's unbanked share. The report flags each one. The data stops at 31 December 2025.
