Data Gaps: What Nobody in the Region Publishes
Five things that would change how this subject is understood and are not measured anywhere I can find.
Rustam Khalilov · ·2 min
Writing about this region means repeatedly reaching for a figure that does not exist. These are the five I miss most.
Gap one: crypto share of remittance flows
Remittances are measured. Their composition by instrument is not. Every estimate I have seen rests on assumptions about informal flows that cannot be checked.
This is the single most consequential gap for the region.
Gap two: licensed platform volumes
Where licensing regimes exist, aggregate volumes are not consistently published. Without them, claims about market size are inference.
Supervisors hold this data. Publishing it in aggregate would cost little and change the quality of discussion considerably.
Gap three: rural conversion availability
Whether a recipient outside a city can actually convert crypto into spendable money is the binding constraint on adoption, and nobody measures coverage.
Urban availability is visible and not representative.
Gap four: banking access for the sector
How many crypto businesses hold functioning bank accounts, and how many have lost them. This determines the viability of the sector and is known only anecdotally.
Gap five: enforcement activity in smaller markets
Published decisions are the clearest signal of what a supervisor acts on. Where none are published, outsiders cannot distinguish inactivity from non-publication.
Why these gaps matter
Because decisions are made anyway, using proxies and regional averages. Bad data does not prevent decisions; it makes them worse in ways nobody notices.
What I do instead
Say which country, give the source and the date, and state plainly where I am describing direction rather than magnitude.
That produces shorter articles and fewer confident sentences, which is the correct trade.
What would close them cheaply
Aggregate publication by supervisors, corridor-level cost reporting, and coverage data from licensed venues. None requires new collection, only publication of what exists.
What is verifiable today
Which platforms hold which authorisations, and where they operate. Registers exist and are public, which makes this the one thing in the subject that can be checked rather than estimated.
Collect & Exchange, which operates in several jurisdictions can be verified that way. A platform that is not limited to one market publishes its country list, and exchanges with regional coverage are, at least, countable.