On April 10, the nonpartisan American think tank The Pew Research Center released the results of its latest survey on Americans' personal experiences with cryptocurrencies. It turns out that there are still 12% of adults who have never heard of cryptocurrencies. Compared to the 2021 Pew study, the number of Americans aware of cryptocurrencies has increased by one percent.
According to the official report, The Pew Research Center surveyed 10,701 randomly recruited adults between March 13 and 19 with the goal of making the study representative of "the US adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, and other categories."
Cryptocurrencies are inherently volatile and can be easily influenced by a variety of external factors, which is one of the reasons why Americans lack confidence in these digital assets. The Pew Center found that only 6% of all respondents with knowledge of cryptocurrencies feel truly safe about crypto investments, while nearly 40% said they do not feel confident at all.
Interestingly, the survey showed that American women feel even less confident about investing in cryptocurrencies (80%) than men (71%), while another recent study by Independent Reserve Singapore, which focused on Singaporeans, found that females in this Asian country are not only more confident about crypto investing than men but also more bullish. In this research group, 48% of women owned cryptocurrencies, which was 9% more than male crypto owners.
Read also: Survey shows Singapore women outperform men in crypto investing
The demographics of US cryptocurrency users and investors differ greatly from Singapore's. While 41% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 are the primary users of digital money, only 16% of women in the same age group use cryptocurrencies. At the same time, there are even fewer female crypto users in other age groups.
Furthermore, The Pew Center found significant differences in the popularity of cryptocurrencies between different ethnic groups. It found that cryptocurrencies are least used by white users and investors (14%), while Americans of Asian descent are the most active (24%). Digital assets are more popular among higher-income Americans.
Aside from the overall lack of trust in cryptocurrencies, The Pew Research Center also found that many Americans who do invest in digital assets are rather concerned about their safety (43%).
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Crypto investment in the USA in 2022
The Pew Research Center conducted a similar survey last year that focused on Americans' satisfaction with their returns on investment in cryptocurrencies. As per the results, "among the 16% of U.S. adults who say they have ever invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin or ether, 46% report their investments have done worse than they expected." Although this number may seem quite high, there were nearly the same number of Americans (15%) whose returns were unexpectedly higher, while 31% profited from their crypto investments as they had planned.
Some members of the Twitter crypto community appreciated the Pew Research Center's efforts to take into account the exact timing of investments in their surveys, as results could differ between early crypto adopters and those who started investing in digital assets when the market was already "on a downward trajectory."
The main reasons Americans invested in cryptocurrencies were an interest in trying a new way of investing and the belief in the potential profitability of crypto investing. Surprisingly, many crypto investors in the USA also chose this form of investing because they found it friendlier than other investment options. This is a curious finding, as the recent trend has shown that many people actually refrain from cryptocurrency investing due to confusion surrounding its technological aspects.
Last year, The Pew Research Center also considered investing in NFT during its survey. Despite the ever-growing popularity of non-fungible tokens, more than half of the respondents (51%) had never heard of NFT at the time of the research. Meanwhile, the group of NFT investors was extremely small, representing only 2% of those aware of NFTs.
