Americans earned over $4 billion from bitcoin in 2020“”more than 3 times as much as investors in any other country

Americans earned over $4 billion from bitcoin in 2020“”more than 3 times as much as investors in any other country

Interest in bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, surged in the past year. Notable investors, including Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones, bought the digital coin; companies like Square, Tesla and MicroStrategy added bitcoin to their balance sheet; and alongside institutional investors, retail traders began to swarm the market. As a result, many Americans profited. Investors in the U.S. made an estimated in realized bitcoin gains in 2020, according to a . That's more than three times as much as the next highest country, China, where investors pocketed $1.1 billion in profit, Chainalysis found. Chainalysis that the reported figures are estimates derived from and says it's impossible to determine for certain where parties are located due to the blockchain and . Though China historically has the one of the , Chainalysis reports, U.S. exchanges saw "huge inflows" in 2020. "We know from past research that there is growing institutional investment in crypto assets, notably in the U.S. Institutional investors work with large quantities of cryptocurrencies and have been stockpiling bitcoin over the past year," Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis, tells CNBC Make It. In addition, "the gains in the U.S. mostly came in toward the end of