Updated Jun 27, 2023, 12:09 p.m. Published Jun 27, 2023, 11:05 a.m. 3 min readStunning view of Lisbon from park to sea (Sally Wilson/Pixabay)The final hub to make the cut into our top-15 ranking of crypto hubs, Lisbon had an above-average rating for crypto regulatory structure, 4 out of 5. That important criteria, in the drivers category, was worth 35% of the total score on its own. But Lisbon scored in the solid middle- to lower-middle of the 25-hub pack on nearly every other measure, from grassroots crypto adoption (another driver) to opportunities criteria including per-capita crypto jobs, companies and events. What lifted the popular expat destination into the final 15 was a higher-than-average quality-of-life score, in the enablers category, worth 15% of the total.For more on the criteria and how we weighted them, see: How We Ranked CoinDesk’s Crypto Hubs 2023: Our Methodology.(Ian Suarez/CoinDesk)In the fall of 2017 I sold everything I owned, left New York City, and bought a one-way ticket to a city where I would stay indefinitely: Lisbon.This was the start of my three-year “digital nomad” journey. Digital nomads hunt for destinations that have both a high quality of life and a low cost of living. It’s a form of geographic arbitrage. Nomads crave cities with high-speed internet, active co-working spaces, a frisky nightlife, culture, sunshine, good food and cheap drinks.Read Crypto Hubs 2023: Where to Live Freely and Work SmartI started my journey in Lisbon, because Lisbon oozes all of these things. It’s a digital nomad wonderland. The Portuguese government realized they had a good thing going, and leaned into it further by creating a digital nomad visa in 2022. Coders, devs, entrepreneurs, and creatives flock to Lisbon for top-shelf Europe at discount prices. (That discount, of course, has narrowed as Lisbon has grown in popularity.) And even back in 2017, many of these digital nomads were obsessed with crypto.“I really want to buy bitcoin, but I feel like the