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. Closed means all three refuse, 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.
One is a business decision nobody has made yet. The other is law.
Sanctions screening is Iran, and it is not going to move.
Licensing is the wide band: ordinary, populous countries where no NIM venue has satisfied the local 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.
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: no account to open, no balance anyone holds, nothing to geofence.
Everything above assumes you have money and a way to spend it. A teenager whose parents hold the only bank card has neither.
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.
A faucet is a way to use NIM, not to acquire it. For someone shut out of every venue here, that 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, and the mainnet one gates on Google reCAPTCHA, so it does not work in mainland China, the largest of the six markets on this page:
| 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. The claim posts to a plain HTTP backend on a non-standard port. A receiving address is public, so there is little to steal. |
| 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 or build against it, this is the right door. |
Suggested by a member of the Nimiq community.
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.
Checked 11 August 2026 by resolving and fetching every URL, dead and live.
The single largest buyer on the three open venues is Nimiq's own treasury. It 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.
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.
Volume figures are the 14 days to 11 August 2026, community reported from the nimiq.cafe Fastspot dashboard.
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.