Where NIM cannot be purchased

Who is shut out

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.

Licensing, not sanctions

These two get treated as one thing. They are not.

Sanctions screening is 2.7 points of the 31.9%. That is Iran, and it is not going to move.

The other 29.2 points are 131.2 million owners in ordinary, populous countries, shut out because no NIM venue has satisfied the local licensing regime.

A licensing block ends the day one already-licensed venue lists NIM.

The United States and China alone are 125 million owners. Both are closed for licensing reasons, not for anything to do with NIM.

Why Singapore closed

CoinEx was the only venue that took Singaporean accounts. On 29 July 2026 it announced it was delisting NIM. Trading closed on 5 August at 08:00 UTC.

The market data followed exactly. The pairs left CoinPaprika, went stale on CoinGecko that morning, and CoinEx's own NIM page now shows no price and no volume.

That took the count from five closed markets to six.

It was not hidden. The notice went up seven days ahead, in a routine batch of nine assets. Nobody read it until the volume moved.

Withdrawals close on 5 November 2026 at 08:00 UTC. That is the part still worth acting on.

The way through

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.

In the 14 days to 11 August 2026, Fastspot moved $3,616 of NIM, about $258 a day, against roughly $24,000 a day on the three exchanges.

That is around 1% of all NIM liquidity, across 33 swaps. 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 community reported from the nimiq.cafe Fastspot dashboard.

Faucets

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. getsome.nimiq.com, the one usually called official, no longer resolves. Neither does nimiqfaucet.io, the Nimtris game, or the old pre-Albatross testnet faucet.

Do not trust a faucet list without opening it.

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.

Method

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.

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.