Crypto Curiosity Peaks, Commitment Slips: Only 13% Used It in the Past Year

Crypto use among U.S. adults reached 22% in a national Ipsos survey for the DeFi Education Fund, up from 18% in 2025, but participation over the past 12 months remained flat at 13%. Among Americans who had not used crypto in the past year, the share who had previously owned or used it more than doubled to 11% from 5%. Plans to buy also remained nearly unchanged, with 17% saying they were likely to own or use crypto in the future, compared with 16% last year.

Men were more than twice as likely as women to have used crypto during the past year, at 18% versus 8%, while adults under 60 were more likely than older Americans to have tried it. Curiosity was the leading reason for trying crypto, cited by 34% of people who had owned it, followed by long-term investment at 25%.

The survey polled 1,545 adults from Sept. 8 to 16 through Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, the probability-based panel used by the Federal Reserve for its annual survey of household finances. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. Respondents expressed more confidence in crypto’s role than in existing financial infrastructure: only 19% considered the traditional financial system secure, while 63% said it needed an upgrade to address cybercrime and AI. Six in 10 worried about data breaches at major financial institutions, 54% doubted those institutions were prepared to protect personal information from AI-driven threats, and 74% said financial privacy mattered.

That skepticism did not translate into strong trust in crypto. Just 4% of Americans had high trust in crypto exchanges and 5% in decentralized platforms, compared with 42% for large national banks. Credit unions led at 48%, down 5 points from last year. Security concerns extend beyond banks: Ledger said all confirmed cases in a suspected $87 million drain involved hardware wallets sold by a Southeast Asian reseller. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake also warned that advances in AI could break the cryptography securing Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) sooner than expected.

Knowledge of decentralized finance remained limited. Only 2% of Americans were very familiar with DeFi, while just 6% could identify all four crypto characteristics listed in the survey and 35% were unsure how to describe crypto. Despite that gap, 40% said they would be at least somewhat likely to try DeFi if it were available; among them, more than 8 in 10 said they would use it to save money, earn interest, or send money to family and friends.

Interest in learning more declined even after the GENIUS Act established federal rules for stablecoins. The share of Americans interested in learning about stablecoins fell to 7% from 11%, while interest in DeFi dropped to 8% from 11%.