Cornell University asked 25,880 people in 25 countries whether they use bitcoin, and the clearest answer was not a technical one. People who actually hold bitcoin tend to live where the banking system is weakest.
That is the core finding of the new Bitcoin Adoption Index report, which Bitcoin Magazine published as its findings on October 2, 2026. The survey was fielded by Morning Consult, a polling firm, along with partners including Cornell's Tech Policy Institute, the Cornell Bitcoin Club, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Reynolds Foundation.
Interviews ran from December 16, 2024 to March 10, 2025, with each respondent answering 125 questions about how they think about and use bitcoin.
Ownership clusters where the local money breaks
Ranked by the share of respondents who said they had ever owned bitcoin, the leaders were not wealthy financial centers. They were El Salvador, Venezuela, and Nigeria, according to the report as covered by Bitcoin Magazine. The study's own read is that this is not a coincidence.
"Ranked by the share of all respondents who have ever owned bitcoin, the leaders are not wealthy financial centers," the report stated. "In each, bitcoin functions less as a speculative bet and more as a practical workaround." Each of those three countries has a different version of the same underlying problem.
Venezuela's economy was hit by hyperinflation and strict currency controls that made dollars hard to get. Nigeria's naira repeatedly lost value, and the country has seen some of the highest on-chain transaction volumes in the world. El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender alongside the US dollar in 2021.
Ella Hough, a Bitcoin Advocacy Associate at Strategy and Junior Fellow at Cornell's Brooks School Tech Policy Institute, explained the pattern directly. "Bitcoin works the same everywhere, but people's need for it does not," she said.
"Across 25 countries, we found that people are more likely to see Bitcoin as a tool for financial freedom where currencies are less stable, banking access is limited, or monetary controls are tighter."
Users run on need, not deep knowledge
Here is the part that cuts against the usual debate. Most users cannot explain how the thing works, and it does not seem to matter much to them. In the Cornell survey, 58% of respondents said they did not know the supply of bitcoin is capped at 21 million coins.
Cornell also found that explaining the protocol's fundamentals was difficult for most people, including the basic fact of the fixed supply. But the same respondents describe practical uses. One Venezuelan interviewee, unnamed in the report, told Cornell that bitcoin was "faster, cleaner, and much less risky" than other ways of getting dollars into the country.
A Salvadoran respondent was quoted saying, "When nobody controls it, it means we all have control of it." And a Nigerian interviewee reportedly told researchers, "I've been to six African countries and whenever I go there, I don't fear it because I know I can spend my bitcoin." The mechanism on display is simple.
When the official banking rails fail, people need a payment network that does not depend on a local bank or a local currency holding its value. Bitcoin settles on its own network, so recipients do not need to trust a government or a central bank in the room.
That is why a system that is hard to explain can still be the one people reach for when the banks don't work.
Use and understanding still point in different directions
The gap between knowing the technology and using it is the study's most interesting wrinkle. Holding bitcoin, sending it, and receiving it are routine for many respondents. Understanding proof of work, supply schedules, or self-custody is not.
For the market, that means adoption can keep spreading even while financial literacy about the asset stays low. It also means surveys like this one are really measuring utility, not ideology. People are not mostly holding bitcoin here because they read the whitepaper.
They are holding it because the alternative, saving in a currency that loses value fast, is worse. Cornell's index does not give a price prediction or a future adoption curve. It records what 25,880 people across 25 countries said between December 16, 2024 and March 10, 2025.
Any future wave of the same survey will show whether ownership is still clustering in places with unstable currencies, tight capital controls, and unreliable access to dollars.