Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive of crypto trading platform FTX. Despite a blitz of media attention and marketing spots, the number of people who’ve committed to crypto throughout the last year hasn’t grown. (Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg News)
In the last year, crypto companies like FTX, Coinbase and Crypto.com have shelled out tens of countless dollars to attract new customers. “Fortune favors the brave,” Matt Damon famously said in a Crypto.com TV spot as he tried to induce Americans to open their digital wallets.
Now a core metric of how successful these were has been returned, and experts say it’s an eye-opening one: not successful at all. The number of people who committed to crypto has not expanded since last September before the push began, based on a brand new study led by Pew Research Center.
The results, released Tuesday, build off an original survey in September. In those days, Pew researchers asked 10,371 Americans if they have “ever committed to, traded, or used a cryptocurrency.” Some 16 percent said they had.
Last month, the nonprofit asked another sample group — slightly smaller, at 6,034 Americans — the exact same question. The number hadn’t grown, with the exact same 16 percent saying they’d sooner or later invested or traded in the alternate currency.
The results suggest that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the fantastic most of Americans remain immune for their sales pitches.
“It’s pretty striking that for the spectacular commotion around crypto within the last year, the number of people who invest or trade in crypto didn’t budge,” said Lee Rainie, Crypto marketing Pew Research Center’s director of internet and technology research, who spearheaded the study. “Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn’t seem to move the needle at all.”
The conclusion of 2021 and beginning of 2022 saw a flurry of recruitment efforts as crypto firms attempted to draw retail investors into the fold — the market’s long-term health in large part relies on new players willing to register for exchanges and buy digital coins.
Many weeks after Damon’s commercial debuted in October, Crypto.com announced a naming-rights deal for Los Angeles’s Staples Center. By February the push was entirely effect. Three trading platforms — Crypto.com, FTX and Coinbase — each bought Super Bowl airtime that was reportedly opting for $6.5 million per 30 seconds.
“That the cryptocurrency space, despite a lot of advertising, has go out of new suckers is not all that surprising if you ask me,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer-security expert from the University of California at Berkeley who has often raised both an economic and ethical case against crypto investment. “Although there’s a sucker born every minute, that is still a limited pool of suckers.”
“Although it is a bit surprising that individual adoption in the US will be flat, I could say that’s not the trend we are seeing in other markets,” Kim Grauer, director of research for Chainalysis, the crypto and blockchain data company, said in a email. “Within our recent research, we’re continuing to see increased grassroots adoption globally, and especially in emerging markets.”
Grauer added that in the United States, “which has a more aged crypto economy and where adoption has stabilized, I expect to see a brand new wave of new entrants into the space as financial institutions commence to roll out the crypto products they’ve announced.”
And not all analysts were embracing the underlying truth of Pew’s findings. “I question the research,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at crypto trading and research company Oanda. “What I’ve seen throughout the last year is a very diverse group of people — lawyers, nurses, doctors, professors — showing extreme interest in crypto, especially at the beginning of 2022, when many of them bought in for the very first time.”
Crypto enthusiasts say studies can underrepresent crypto investors, because not everybody wants to share with a questioner they have invested and because studies don’t search for pockets of these most more likely to invest. Rainie said Pew took rigorous steps to attain proportional representation across various racial, gender and economic groups.
Industry leaders are warning that new pools of investors might be even harder to find in the coming months. On an earnings call this month, the publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase, which ended 2021 with 11.4 million monthly active users, said it expected in order to complete the year with between 7 million and 9 million monthly active users.
Moya said that even though retail investors disappear in the wake of the recent crash, the crypto markets might be fueled by institutional investors, who’re prone to buy in after a crash.
The Pew study also examined demographic data and found so it hadn’t changed much over the past year either. As in September, adults over 50 were just about one-fourth as likely to invest in crypto as adults under 30, while men were 2.5 times more likely than women to place profit crypto.
The analysis also found that the marketing campaigns didn’t do much to heighten general crypto awareness. Last September, the percentage of those that said they’ve heard “nothing at all” abut cryptocurrency was at 14 percent. By come early july, after every one of the media attention, the ranks of the crypto-ignorant had shrunk by just one percentage point, to 13 percent.