Roughly 22% of U.S. adults say they have owned or used cryptocurrency at some point, up from 18% in 2025, according to a national survey conducted by Ipsos for the DeFi Education Fund, a crypto policy advocacy group. Yet the share of Americans who used crypto in the past 12 months held steady at 13%, and nearly all of the growth in lifetime adoption came from people who have since stepped away.

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. Probability-based panels recruit participants in a way intended to mirror the demographics of the U.S. population.

Among Americans who had not used crypto in the past year, the share who had ever owned or used it more than doubled, rising to 11% from 5%. Forward-looking intent was similarly static: 17% of respondents said they are likely to own or use crypto in the future, compared with 16% last year.

Adoption patterns diverged sharply across demographics. Men were more than twice as likely as women to have used crypto in the past year, at 18% versus 8%, and adults under 60 were far more likely to have used it than older Americans. Curiosity remained the leading motivation for trying crypto, cited by 34% of those who have owned it, followed by long-term investment at 25%.

Distrust of Traditional Finance Doesn't Extend to Crypto

The survey also captured deep unease with the traditional financial system. Only 19% of Americans describe the system as secure, while 63% say it needs an upgrade to combat threats such as cybercrime and artificial intelligence. Six in 10 respondents worry about data breaches at major financial institutions, and 54% doubt those institutions are prepared to protect personal information from AI-driven threats. Financial privacy matters to 74% of Americans.

That skepticism, however, has not translated into confidence in crypto. Just 4% of respondents expressed high trust in crypto exchanges, and 5% said the same of decentralized platforms. By comparison, 42% trust large national banks, while credit unions led all categories at 48%, down five percentage points from last year. Those numbers form the public-opinion backdrop for ongoing policy debates in Washington over how digital asset platforms should be regulated.

Security concerns extend beyond banks. Crypto wallet maker Ledger said all confirmed cases in a suspected $87 million drain involved hardware wallets — devices that store the private keys controlling crypto holdings offline — sold by a Southeast Asian reseller. Separately, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently warned that advances in AI could break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum sooner than expected.

Wide Knowledge Gap, but Openness to DeFi

The survey also highlighted a substantial knowledge gap around crypto and decentralized finance, or DeFi, the umbrella term for crypto-native financial applications that let users buy, sell, or borrow digital assets without third-party intermediaries. Only 2% of Americans said they are very familiar with DeFi. Just 6% could identify all four characteristics of crypto listed in the survey, while 35% were not sure how to describe it at all.

Despite the low familiarity, 40% of respondents said they would be at least somewhat likely to try DeFi if it were available to them. Among that group, 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 about the sector is slipping, however. The share of Americans who want to learn about stablecoins — tokens designed to track the value of a reference asset such as the U.S. dollar — fell to 7% from 11%, and interest in learning about DeFi fell to 8% from 11%, a decline that came even after the GENIUS Act established federal rules for stablecoins. With those federal rules now on the books, how the familiarity and interest figures move in future waves of the survey will be one measure of the law's reach with the broader public.