Nearly a quarter of adults with internet access may own cryptocurrency in the Asia-Pacific region, a report jointly compiled by Protocol Theory and CoinDesk said on Friday.
The report, based on a survey of 4,020 people in 10 different countries and extrapolated to the wider APAC region, further suggested that crypto adoption is spurred by a lack of access to traditional financial services. Meanwhile, stablecoins are being adopted by nearly 18% of adults with internet access in emerging markets in the region.
How fast adoption continues to grow will depend on how easy it is to use digital assets in everyday life, said the report, published ahead of CoinDesk’s Consensus: Hong Kong conference next February.
“APAC Digital Asset Adoption 2025 finds that participation is now shaped by ease of use, integration and inclusion rather than speculation,” the report said. “Stack coins, remittances and tokenized assets are emerging as the practical foundations of a digital economy that operates across borders and entities, supported by regulatory frameworks designed to enable rather than limit participation.”
According to the survey, the report stated that half of adults who know about cryptocurrency intend to use it within the next year or so, despite marginal adoption over the past year. The study was conducted in India, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Australia and Japan, with the United Arab Emirates included as a comparable market. About 400 people from each country were surveyed. It also focused on adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who have access to the Internet and had previously heard of crypto.
One reason for the slow adoption may be that traditional financial services — digital bank accounts, money transfers, even bill payments — are relatively easy across the region compared to “the complexity of wallets, exchanges and token transfers,” the report said.
But a regulatory regime in development across different countries enables growth and adoption, the report states.
More than 70% of adults in emerging economies – such as the UAE, India, China, the Philippines and Thailand – say rules are important, the report said. That number drops to around 66% in places like Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore, and drops below 50% in Japan.
“This divergence reflects different stages of market trust. In emerging economies, regulation fills an institutional gap – acting as a proxy for trust and signaling that participation is legitimate,” the report said.
“In mature markets where comprehensive consumer protections already exist, regulation acts less as a bridge to access and more as a means of managing risk.”
