Crypto’ vertisements large marketing campaigns currently have used very few innovative individuals.
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive of crypto trading platform FTX. Despite a blitz of media attention and marketing spots, the amount of people who’ve invested in 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 millions of 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 they certainly were has been returned, and experts say it’s an eye-opening one: not successful at all. The amount of people who invested in crypto hasn’t expanded since last September ahead of the push began, based on a brand new study led by Pew Research Center.
The outcomes, released Tuesday, build off an original survey in September. In the past, Pew researchers asked 10,371 Americans if they have “ever invested in, 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 same question. The number hadn’t grown, with the same 16 percent saying they’d sooner or later invested or traded in the alternate currency.
The outcomes declare that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the truly amazing majority of Americans remain immune for their sales pitches.
“It’s pretty striking that for all the spectacular commotion around crypto in the last year, the amount 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 create in new buyers to the market didn’t seem to move the needle at all.”
The end of 2021 and beginning of 2022 saw a flurry of recruitment efforts as crypto firms attemptedto draw retail investors in to the fold — the market’s long-term health in large part relies on new players willing to register for exchanges and buy digital coins.
Several 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 has been reportedly opting for $6.5 million per 30 seconds.
“That the cryptocurrency space, despite a ton of advertising, has come to an end of new suckers is not all that surprising in my experience,” 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’s still a limited pool of suckers.”
“While it is a bit surprising that individual adoption in the US could be flat, I will 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 within an 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, “that includes a more mature crypto economy and where adoption has stabilized, I be prepared to see a brand new wave of new entrants into the room as financial institutions begin 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 study,” 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 band of people — lawyers, nurses, doctors, professors — showing extreme fascination with crypto, especially at the beginning of 2022, when most of them bought in for the initial 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 seek out pockets of those most more likely to invest. Rainie said Pew took rigorous steps to achieve proportional representation across various racial, gender and economic groups.
Industry leaders are warning that new pools of investors could 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 to complete the season with between 7 million and 9 million monthly active users.
Moya said that even if retail investors drop off in the wake of the recent crash, the crypto markets could be fueled by institutional investors, that are more prone to buy in after having 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 all the marketing campaigns didn’t do much to heighten general crypto awareness. Last September, the percentage of people who said they’ve heard “nothing at all” abut cryptocurrency was at 14 percent. By come july 1st, after all of the media attention, the ranks of the crypto-ignorant had shrunk by only one percentage point, to 13 percent.