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The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that what Americans believe about future crypto returns predicts who owns bitcoin and other digital assets better than their age, income, education, or wealth combined, according to a working paper published July 14, 2026.
Drawing on years of large-scale quarterly surveys covering roughly 25,000 U.S. households, researchers Michael Weber, Bernardo Candia, Olivier Coibion, and Yuriy Gorodnichenko find that crypto behaves differently from traditional asset classes. Ownership is shaped not simply by age, income, education, or wealth, but by what people believe about crypto’s future returns.
The findings suggest that crypto has carved out a distinctive place in household financial decision-making one driven as much by expectations and perception as by traditional economic fundamentals.
The study tracks cryptocurrency ownership from roughly 2% of households in 2018 to about 11%–12% by the mid-2020s.
Ownership surged alongside rising crypto prices in 2021 and 2022, but continued to increase even after the subsequent market downturn. That persistence suggests adoption is not driven entirely by price movements.
The figures broadly align with other major surveys. Pew Research has found that 16% of Americans have ever owned or traded cryptocurrency, while Federal Reserve surveys have placed recent crypto ownership at around 12%.
The typical crypto holder differs from the broader U.S. population. Crypto owners tend to be disproportionately younger, male, higher-income, and less likely to be white. They are also more likely to identify as libertarian or politically independent.
Age is the strongest demographic predictor. People under 40 are about 13 percentage points more likely to own crypto than those over 60, even after accounting for income, education, and wealth.
Education, however, has little independent relationship with crypto ownership once other factors are considered. The researchers also find that households receiving larger pandemic-era stimulus payments were more likely to hold cryptocurrency.
For most owners, crypto represents a relatively modest portion of their overall wealth. About 40% hold less than 5% of their wealth in crypto, while roughly 70% hold less than 15%.
But the distribution is highly uneven. About 20% of crypto owners have more than half of their financial assets invested in digital coins, while the average crypto allocation among owners is around 19%.
Many owners also appear reluctant to sell. About 41% say they would like to increase their crypto holdings, 30% intend to maintain their current allocation, and only 4% plan to sell.
Bitcoin dominates ownership, but Ethereum and Dogecoin are also widely held, with each owned by more than 40% of crypto holders. The researchers argue that this pattern points toward expectations of speculative upside as a major motivation, rather than narrower use cases such as anonymity or faster international payments.
Perhaps the paper’s most important finding is that expected returns matter far more for cryptocurrency ownership than demographic characteristics.
Crypto owners expected an average return of about 22% over the following year, compared with just 7% among non-owners.
That gap is striking when compared with traditional assets. For gold, for example, owners expected a 9.9% return while non-owners expected 10.3% essentially no difference.
The researchers‘ statistical “horse race” reinforces the point. Expectations about crypto’s future performance explain nearly twice as much variation in ownership as observable characteristics such as income, age, education, race, and employment status combined. Adding perceptions of crypto’s riskiness increases its explanatory power further.
The pattern is almost reversed for other asset classes. For stocks, bonds, gold, and housing, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics are substantially more important than beliefs about future returns.
In other words, who you are tells researchers a great deal about whether you own traditional assets. With crypto, what you believe about its future may matter more.
Crypto price gains also appear to influence household spending but in a very specific way.
When Bitcoin’s price doubles, an all-crypto household becomes about 7% more likely to purchase a durable good, such as a car or major appliance, during that quarter. The effect is strongest for large-ticket purchases.
But there is virtually no corresponding increase in everyday nondurable spending on items such as groceries, personal care, or entertainment.
That differs from the spending response to stock and bond gains, which can influence regular household consumption.
The researchers interpret the crypto effect as resembling a lottery payout. When cryptocurrency appreciates sharply, households appear more likely to treat the gain as an unexpected windfall and spend part of it on a major purchase rather than permanently increasing their day-to-day consumption.
Gold shows a similar pattern, while stock and bond wealth appears more likely to affect ongoing spending.
For many non-owners, the biggest obstacle is not necessarily distrust. It is simply a lack of information.
About 84% of survey respondents could not provide a numerical forecast for crypto’s future returns. That non-response rate was substantially higher than for stocks at 68%, bonds at 74%, gold at 78%, and housing at 72%.
The knowledge gap is particularly important because non-owners are far less willing than owners to make return forecasts across asset classes. The difference is most pronounced for cryptocurrency.
That suggests a significant portion of the population may remain outside the crypto market not because they have decided against it, but because they do not feel sufficiently informed to form an opinion.
The researchers also conducted a randomized controlled trial in 2025 to test how new information affects crypto decisions.
Some participants were told that Bitcoin had returned 14.3% over the previous year. Others were shown a Bitcoin price chart, while separate groups received information about stock returns, GameStop returns, or inflation.
Simply receiving information about Bitcoin’s recent performance increased participants’ expected crypto returns by roughly 1–3 percentage points.
It also increased their desired crypto allocation by about 2 percentage points nearly a 50% increase relative to the 4.3% average allocation in the relevant sample and led participants to buy more cryptocurrency in subsequent months. The purchasing effect was statistically significant.
Interestingly, Bitcoin information also increased some participants’ desired allocation to stocks, suggesting that exposure to crypto information may broaden appetite for risky assets more generally.
By contrast, information about stock returns had little effect on crypto decisions, while inflation information produced no meaningful change.
The implication is important: specific, recent asset-return information appears to influence crypto demand more strongly than broad macroeconomic information.
The findings offer a potential mechanism for how speculative cycles can reinforce themselves.
An unfamiliar asset produces unusually strong returns. Investors learn about those gains. Previously uninformed households revise their expectations upward. More people enter the market, increasing demand and potentially pushing prices higher which can then generate even more optimistic expectations.
That feedback loop may help explain why cryptocurrency markets can experience both rapid adoption and extreme volatility.
Because a large share of the population remains uncertain or uninformed about crypto, the researchers suggest that sharply divided expectations could continue to play a central role in cryptocurrency household finance.
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