More Americans have tried cryptocurrency than a year ago, but far fewer are still using it, according to a national survey conducted by Ipsos for the DeFi Education Fund, a crypto policy advocacy group.
Some 22% of U.S. adults say they have ever owned or used crypto, up from 18% in 2025. However, the share who used crypto in the past 12 months held flat at 13%. The growth came almost entirely from people who have stepped away: among Americans who hadn’t used crypto in the past year, the share who had ever owned or used it more than doubled, to 11% from 5%.
Plans to buy are also flat. Seventeen percent say they’re likely to own or use crypto in the future, compared with 16% last year.
Demographic and usage patterns
Men were more than twice as likely as women to have used crypto in the past year, 18% to 8%, and adults under 60 were far more likely to have used it than older Americans. Curiosity remains the top reason people tried crypto, cited by 34% of those who have owned it, followed by long-term investment at 25%.
The survey polled 1,545 adults from Sept. 8 to 16 on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, the same probability-based panel the Federal Reserve uses for its annual survey of household finances. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
Unease with traditional finance
The survey also found deep unease with the traditional financial system. Only 19% of Americans say it’s secure, while 63% say it needs an upgrade to combat threats like cybercrime and AI. Six in 10 worry about data breaches at major financial institutions, and 54% doubt those institutions are ready to protect their personal information from AI-driven threats. Financial privacy matters to 74%.
That skepticism hasn’t translated into trust in crypto. Just 4% have 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 worries aren’t limited to banks. Crypto wallet maker 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 recently warned that advances in AI could break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum sooner than expected.
Knowledge gap and DeFi interest
The survey also points to a wide knowledge gap. Only 2% of Americans are very familiar with decentralized finance, or DeFi, shorthand for the group of crypto-native financial applications that allow users to buy, sell, or borrow digital assets without third-party intermediaries.
Just 6% could identify all four characteristics of crypto listed in the survey, while 35% weren’t sure how to describe it at all. Yet 40% say they’d be at least somewhat likely to try DeFi if it were available. Among them, more than 8 in 10 say they’d use it to save money, earn interest or send money to family and friends.
Interest in learning more is slipping, though. The share who want to learn about stablecoins fell to 7% from 11%, and about DeFi to 8% from 11%, even after the GENIUS Act set federal rules for stablecoins.
