According to a report by Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm, Americans' realized gains from investing in Bitcoin in 2020 are estimated to be $4.1 billion, the highest in the world.
"We know from past research that institutional investor investment in cryptocurrency assets is growing, especially in the US," said Kim Grauer, research director at Chainalysis, "Institutional investors deal with a lot of cryptocurrencies and have been hoarding bitcoin over the past year."
Moreover, "the bulk of the U.S. rally came at the end of the year, so we suspect that many institutional traders who fit this profile profit-making as prices rose at the end of 2020."
"We estimate that the late-2020 rally has prompted many investors to make exit plans to realize gains made earlier in the year," Grauer said.
Chainalysis works by measuring on-chain money flowing to different cryptocurrency exchanges, and then by measuring the difference between the price of the bitcoin in dollars when it is withdrawn from the platform and the price when it is received, it calculates roughly the global return on bitcoin in 2020. "Then we according to each country in each exchange site accounts for a share of the network traffic, according to the national distribution of these gains (or losses), and this analysis gives us a reasonable estimate, namely each country's currency investors in 2020 realized gains, although it did not take into account the has not yet been extracted from the exchange of assets."