Where NIM cannot be bought at all, and what it costs

The closed door

Every live NIM order book refuses the same handful of countries. Not a thinner book, not a worse price. No account.

Three venues carry NIM: MEXC, Gate and KuCoin. A market is closed here only when all three turn it away, so this is the floor, not a worst case. Together these markets hold 143.2 million crypto owners, 31.9% of every owner the underlying dataset counts. Marketing aimed at them is spend against a locked door.

Licensing, not sanctions

These two groups get treated as one thing and they are not. Sanctions screening accounts for 2.7 points of the 31.9%. The other 29.2 points, 131.2 million owners, are ordinary rich and populous countries that simply have a licensing regime no NIM venue has bothered to satisfy.

That distinction decides what can be done. A sanctions block is not going to move. A licensing block moves the moment one venue that already holds the right permissions decides to list NIM. The United States and China alone are 125 million owners, and both are closed for licensing reasons rather than anything about NIM.

Singapore closed on 5 August

Until this month Singapore was reachable. CoinEx was the one venue that took Singaporean accounts, and on 29 July 2026 CoinEx announced it was delisting NIM. Deposits and trading closed on 5 August at 08:00 UTC, and the market data followed exactly: the pairs vanished from CoinPaprika, went stale on CoinGecko that morning, and CoinEx's own NIM page now reports no price and no volume.

So the count went from five closed markets to six. What is worth noticing is that this was not hidden. It was posted seven days ahead, in a routine batch alongside eight other assets, and it still went unremarked until the volume moved. A market can close on schedule, in public, and nobody reads the notice. Withdrawals close on 5 November 2026 at 08:00 UTC, which is the part still worth acting on.

The one way through, and how small it is

None of this means a determined person in a closed market cannot hold NIM. Fastspot, the swap built into the Nimiq Wallet, trades NIM against USDC, USDT and BTC as non-custodial atomic swaps, so someone who already holds crypto can convert into NIM without an exchange account. Its euro on-ramp cannot help here, being SEPA only, but the crypto to crypto leg is the reason this page says closed to buying rather than closed to owning.

It is worth being honest about the scale. In the fourteen days to 11 August 2026 Fastspot moved $3,616 of NIM, about $258 a day, against roughly $24,000 a day across the three exchanges. Around one per cent of all NIM liquidity, across 33 swaps. It is a real door and almost nobody walks through it. Fastspot's own terms never resolve whether US Persons may use it, forbidding you from disguising your location if you are one without ever stating the bar that implies, but in practice the swap completes from the United States, reported first hand. There is no account to open and no balance anyone holds, so there is nothing to geofence the way an exchange geofences a signup. Figures are community reported from the nimiq.cafe Fastspot dashboard.

Method

Owner counts are Triple-A's 2023 country table, 146 countries, 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 terms and prohibited jurisdiction pages, not from a listicle. The companion piece has the venue by venue detail.