At least 16% of Americans have owned crypto

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A survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that about 16% of Americans have invested, traded or used some form of cryptocurrency. The number climbs to 31% for people aged 18 to 29, and even more to 43% for men of the same age group. Black, Hispanic and Asian participants in the study were also each more likely to have invested in crypto than those who identified as white. There appears to have been no income disparity.

Andrew Perrin, analyst at Pew Research, said:

“We are now seeing that a large portion of the American public has heard at least a little bit about cryptocurrencies. It was striking how much demographic differences there are in the knowledge and use of cryptocurrencies. “

The survey sample consisted of 10,371 adults selected from the centre’s American Trends Panel. The panel is recruited by a nationwide random sample of addresses, then weighted by a multitude of factors, including ethnicity, political party, gender, and education.

Panel members were also asked if they had heard of cryptocurrencies. Almost a quarter of those surveyed (24%) said they had heard a lot about crypto, while almost two-thirds (62%) said they had heard of it. About an eighth (13%) had heard nothing about crypto at all. There is also some variation by race, sex, age and income in the crosstabs for this question.

Asian Americans were by far the most likely (43%) to report knowing a lot about cryptocurrency. Only between 25% and 29% of all other ethnic groups reported being very knowledgeable about cryptocurrency. While crypto investment rates do not vary across income brackets, the rate of respondents claiming deep knowledge of crypto has increased commensurate with income here. Much like with crypto investment rates, there was a strong correlation between being young and being male when it came to self-reported crypto knowledge.

In 2015, Pew conducted a survey that asked similar (though not exactly identical) questions about Bitcoin (BTC), rather than cryptocurrencies as a whole. At that time, the results were quite different. Only 1% of those surveyed said they had invested in Bitcoin themselves, and only 48% had even heard of Bitcoin. Respondents who had heard of Bitcoin leaned in favor of white, college-educated, high-income males.

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