Six markets are refused by every live NIM order book. Not a thinner book or a worse price. No account at all.
Three venues carry NIM: MEXC, Gate and KuCoin. A market counts as closed only when all three turn it away, so this is the floor, not the worst case.
Those six hold 143.2 million crypto owners, 31.9% of everyone the dataset counts. Marketing aimed there is spend against a locked door.
Singapore is closed too but is not shown, because the ownership data does not carry it. Nor does it carry North Korea, Cuba or Sudan, which every venue screens.
These two get treated as one thing. They are not. One is a business decision nobody has made yet. The other is law.
Sanctions screening is the small red sliver. That is Iran, and it is not going to move.
The orange band is 131.2 million owners in ordinary, populous countries, shut out because no NIM venue has satisfied the local licensing regime. The United States and China alone are 125 million of them.
Nothing about that band is about NIM. A licensing block ends the day one already-licensed venue lists it.
CoinEx was the only venue that took Singaporean accounts. It delisted NIM, and that took the count from five closed markets to six.
A closed market still lets you hold NIM. Fastspot, the swap inside the Nimiq Wallet, trades NIM against USDC, USDT and BTC as non-custodial atomic swaps.
Anyone already holding crypto can convert into NIM with no exchange account. The euro on-ramp is SEPA only, so it does not help here. These markets are closed to buying, not to owning.
Both bars are on the same scale. Fastspot is about 1% of all NIM liquidity: a real door that almost nobody walks through.
Fastspot's terms never say whether US Persons may use it. In practice the swap completes from the United States: there is no account to open and no balance anyone holds, so there is nothing to geofence.
Volume figures are the 14 days to 11 August 2026, community reported from the nimiq.cafe Fastspot dashboard.
Everything above assumes you have money and a way to spend it. Plenty of people have neither, whether that is a closed market or a teenager whose parents hold the only bank card.
A faucet hands out a tiny amount of NIM for free. No account, no payment. Enough to send a real transaction on a real chain and watch it settle in seconds.
NIM trades at about $0.00048, so a 0.2 NIM claim is roughly one hundredth of a cent. Claiming all day at the maximum comes to three tenths of a cent.
A faucet is not a way to acquire NIM. It is a way to use it, which for someone shut out of every venue here may be the only part available.
Most faucets people still link to are gone. Every one of these was resolved on 11 August 2026:
Do not trust a faucet list without opening it. Two are still live:
| Faucet | Gives | Network | What to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| nimiq-faucet.surge.shThe only live mainnet faucet found | 0.2 NIM per 7.5 minutes, 30 claims a day | Mainnet, real NIM | One person's side project on free static hosting, funded by donations, so it may stop without notice. It gates on Google reCAPTCHA, which means it does not work in mainland China, the largest of the six markets on this page. The claim posts to a plain HTTP backend on a non-standard port. A receiving address is public, so there is little to steal. It is not a polished service and does not pretend to be. |
| faucet.pos.nimiq-testnet.comFor building, not for holding | 10,000 NIM per request, no rate limit | Testnet, worthless by design | Test coins have no value and cannot be sold, which is the point: nothing about acquiring them is restricted anywhere. To learn how Nimiq works, write against it, or build something, this is the right door. It is the one route on this page no jurisdiction closes. |
Checked 11 August 2026 by resolving and fetching each one. Suggested by a member of the Nimiq community, whose point was right: access to buying and access to trying are different questions.
Thin books cut both ways. The single largest buyer on the three open venues is Nimiq's own treasury, which has taken 1.39 billion NIM off them since August 2025 and published the addresses holding it.
Owner counts are Triple-A's 2023 country table, 146 countries. It is the newest complete per country dataset anyone publishes.
Percentages are against that table's own total of 449 million, so they describe the measured world rather than the whole world.
Restrictions were read from each venue's own terms, not from a listicle. Buying is also not the only door: NIMmesh, now in alpha, moves a payment with no exchange and no internet at all.