According to a recent report from Chainalysis, the region of Central, Northern and Western Europe (CNWE) together has driven the highest level of cryptocurrency activity globally over the past one year. A decline in crypto activity through Eastern Asia has helped CNWE claim the top spot after coming in second previously.

Since July 2020, the European regions have witnessed explosive growth in cryptocurrency related activities, including cryptocurrencies, services and especially in DeFi protocols. While institutional investment (transactions over $10 million) in the crypto market exploded during the period and contributed to the stellar rise, retail activity among individual investors also surged over the past year in CNWE.

For every other region that was part of the research, CNWE remained the largest cryptocurrency trading partner, receiving at least 25% of funds from every other part of the world and sending at least 24% of funds into these regions. The leading partnership was between CNWE and North America, accounting for 34% of receipt into Western Europe and 33% of funds being transferred out of it and into North America.

The amount of large institutional cryptocurrency transaction volume spiked from $1.4 billion in July 2020 to a whopping $46.3 billion a year later, by June 2021, and accounted for over 50% of crypto activity across CNWE. What’s even more interesting is that a significant majority of these transactions were made in Ethereum and wrapped Ethereum (wETH) – the most commonly used tokens for transactions within DeFi protocols.

Over the past year, DeFi protocols Uniswap, Instadapp and dydx remained among the top five services used in the region for most of the months. The most popularly used cryptocurrency exchanges were Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.