Key takeaways

Young men use crypto at the highest rates. 27% of men have ever invested in, traded, or used crypto, versus 11% of women. The rates are higher among young men: 38% of men ages 18 to 29.
Today’s users are largely a pandemic-era cohort. New entry has slowed sharply since the 2020–2021 boom: even Bitcoin’s record highs in 2024 and 2025 drew far fewer first-time investors, and men ages 30 to 49 are now ahead of men 18 to 29 in lifetime use — a sign the cohort is aging rather than being replaced by younger traders.
Crypto users skew banked, educated, and higher-income. Crypto use was higher among banked households than unbanked households, 5.0% versus 1.2%, and higher among higher-income, more-educated, and younger households.
Even crypto users are concerned about its risk profile. A 2026 AIBM/Ipsos poll found that 91% of respondents, including young men, who had heard of crypto called investing in it risky. Views were split on whether buying crypto is closer to gambling (27%), investing (29%), or a mix of both (32%).
The best-documented adverse outcomes involve fraud and high-intensity trading. Crypto was involved in 9% of non-credit-card fraud cases but had the highest unrecovered-loss rate among listed payment methods, at 65%.

Introduction

Cryptocurrency trading has gone from a niche pursuit to a mainstream financial activity in the United States, especially among men. In 2026, nearly 2 in 5 American men ages 18 to 49 said they had ever invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency — roughly two and a half times the rate among women the same age.

A review of existing evidence surfaces three key findings. First, much of today’s user base appears to be a cohort that entered during the 2020–2021 crypto boom and stayed. Second, although crypto has a range of uses, most U.S. consumers hold it as a speculative investment, while relatively few use it for payments. Third, we know surprisingly little about whether young men’s participation is mostly casual and modest or a source of concentrated losses and compulsive use. The uncertainty about compulsive use and potential harms shapes the brief’s policy principles and the research agenda.

Data note

This brief assesses what we know about crypto use among young American men: who uses it, why, and with what effects. It draws almost entirely on U.S. data. Crypto adoption in other countries — where currency instability, capital controls, and remittances play much larger roles — follows different patterns and is outside this brief’s scope.

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets recorded on decentralized ledgers and traded on exchanges, rather than issued or backed by governments or banks. The label covers a range of assets with very different risk profiles, including Bitcoin and other established tokens, stablecoins pegged to the dollar, and memecoins with no underlying use, whose prices can move drastically within hours. Existing prevalence statistics that lump these together necessarily blur those differences. Since 2024, consumers can also gain crypto exposure through exchange-traded funds (ETFs) held in ordinary brokerage accounts — a channel most surveys do not yet capture.

Crypto prevalence depends heavily on question wording. The Pew Research Center asks whether adults have ever invested in, traded, or used crypto. Gallup asks whether adults currently own it. The Federal Reserve asks whether adults used crypto in the past year for investment, purchases, payments, or transfers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reports household ownership or use. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) surveys adults with non-retirement investments. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) THRIVE panel measures household ownership of cryptocurrency or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) quarterly in a probability-based longitudinal sample. These estimates are not interchangeable, and none gives a clean national measure of high-intensity trading. This brief treats Pew (lifetime use) and the Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED (past-year investment use), as primary sources and labels others where cited. The Fed flags that because SHED is conducted online, the sample may be more technologically connected than the overall population, which could inflate reported use of emerging technologies like crypto.

Young men are crypto’s core users

The gender gap

All major surveys find a gender gap in crypto trading. The Pew Research Center’s 2026 survey — the most recent nationally representative measure of lifetime use — shows that 27% of men and 11% of women have ever invested in, traded, or used crypto. The gap is widest among younger adults: 38% of men ages 18 to 29, versus 15% of women the same age, and 40% versus 17% among adults ages 30 to 49.

Figure 1

Other surveys, using different measures, corroborate the pattern. Gallup’s 2025 current-ownership measure shows men ages 18 to 49 are the most likely group to own crypto, at 25% — more than three times the rate among women the same age (8%). The Urban Institute’s January 2026 survey finds men about two and a half times more likely than women to currently own crypto (13% versus 5%). And a 2022 JPMorgan Chase Institute analysis of nearly five million active checking accounts found men were about twice as likely as women to use crypto accounts, and transferred substantially more money into them.

Why the gap exists is less clear. It may reflect the general pattern that men — especially young men — take more financial risk than women. Men disproportionately invest as the asset becomes more speculative and self-directed: in 401(k) participation, women match or exceed men at the same income; in personal stock ownership, men lead modestly (47% vs. 39%); in crypto, men lead by 2 to 3 times. Similarly, JPMorgan Chase Institute data show that men are about twice as likely as women to hold crypto accounts — nearly three times more likely among Gen Z and millennials.

But risk appetite alone may not be the whole story. In the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) THRIVE panel, women remained significantly less likely than men to own crypto even after controlling for measured risk tolerance, income, education, and financial literacy. There may be something about crypto that specifically appeals to young men, such as its online communities, technological reputation, and marketing. No study yet distinguishes between these explanations, as we note in the proposed research agenda below.

A boom-era cohort, aging into its thirties

Crypto adoption grew sharply through the 2020–2021 pandemic-era boom and has since plateaued. Many of the young men who entered then have aged into their thirties and remain crypto’s core audience.

Bank data show the rapid boom during COVID. A 2022 JPMorgan Chase Institute analysis of nearly five million active checking accounts found the share of people transferring funds into a crypto-related account grew from 3% prior to 2020 to 13% by June 2022 — growth that tracked the 2020–2021 bull market in crypto prices. When Bitcoin hit new all-time highs in March and November 2024, the number of individuals moving money in remained substantially below the 2021 peak. The next all-time high, in May 2025, produced no significant uptick in new investors at all. Record prices no longer attracted new investors like the COVID-era boom.

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) shows a plateau effect, in which 11% of adults used cryptocurrency as an investment in 2021, falling to 7% in 2023 and recovering to 9% in 2025. The SEC’s THRIVE panel similarly finds ownership remained flat, at about 9% of the population, across every quarter from January 2024 through April 2025.

In Pew’s January 2026 survey, 19% of U.S. adults said they had ever invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency — up from 16% in 2021. The core user base remains male, but has shifted older. 40% of men ages 30 to 49 now report lifetime use, a slightly higher figure than the 38% of men ages 18 to 29.

Figure 2

FINRA’s 2024 investor survey points in the same direction: crypto investment among investors under 35 who were aware of crypto declined from 53% in 2021 to 50% in 2024, while rising among investors 35 and older.

Figure 3

The cohort story is suggestive, not conclusive. The SEC’s THRIVE panel — a nationally representative longitudinal survey — adds important nuance. Only about a third of people who owned crypto at any point during 2024–2025 owned it consistently across the period, while a similar share cycled in and out more than once. Overall, the data indicate that today’s youngest adult men are not entering crypto at higher rates than the men who came in during the COVID-era boom.

The profile of crypto traders: banked, educated, and higher-income

The demographic profile of U.S. crypto users is well established, and it is not a profile of the financially excluded. The 2023 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households found that crypto use was higher among banked households than unbanked households, 5.0% versus 1.2%, and higher among higher-income, more-educated, and younger households.

Pew’s 2026 survey finds a similar prevalence breakdown by income: about 1 in 4 upper-income adults have used crypto, compared with 1 in 5 middle-income adults and 1 in 6 lower-income adults.

Figure 4

If crypto were serving people excluded from banking, as industry proponents have suggested, we would expect heavier use for payments and borrowing rather than the investment use that dominates in practice. And the poorest households rarely have surplus capital to allocate to a speculative asset. The Urban Institute finds that crypto is generally used alongside, rather than instead of, traditional finance: crypto owners commonly hold checking accounts, retirement accounts, high-yield savings accounts, and stocks, based on a nationally representative January 2026 survey of 3,194 adults.

Figure 5

The racial pattern of crypto use has shifted, upending an early storyline. During the COVID-era boom, crypto drew wide attention as an asset where adoption among Black Americans was outpacing White Americans. A 2021 Pew survey found that 18% of Black adults had invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency compared with 13% of white adults. Similarly, a 2022 survey by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab found that 25% of Black Americans owned crypto compared to 15% of White Americans.

More recent data, including from Pew, finds that White adults now are about as likely as Black and Hispanic adults to have used crypto, while Asian adults report the highest rate — a pattern the FDIC, Urban Institute, and JPMorgan Chase Institute all corroborate. Some of this likely reflects wealth composition rather than race as such: Asian households have, on average, substantially higher wealth than other groups, and crypto ownership tracks income and wealth, though less steeply than conventional investing.

Taken together: the typical American crypto owner is a younger man with a bank account, some college education, and above-median income, who holds crypto as one speculative asset within an otherwise conventional portfolio.

Motivations and attitudes: why people trade crypto

Why do young men buy crypto? This section examines common explanations. The first is price momentum: people invest in what’s going up, especially when peers and influencers are talking about it. The second is hedging against inflation. People worried that rising prices erode their cash and savings may turn to crypto as an asset they expect to increase in value. The third and fourth explanations are two halves of what commentators describe as “financial nihilism,” a loss of faith in conventional paths to financial stability. The phrase bundles two distinct claims: that young people distrust financial institutions, and that they believe conventional paths no longer work, so outsized risks are necessary to meet their financial goals. In this section, we examine each claim in turn. Unfortunately, few findings about motivations and attitudes are broken out by gender, so this section describes crypto users overall, who are disproportionately men.

Price momentum: The best-documented driver

People buy crypto when prices are rising. In a 95-country study of crypto app usage from 2015 to 2022, the Bank for International Settlements found that rising Bitcoin prices were followed by more downloads and more active use of exchange apps. The JPMorgan Chase Institute’s checking-account analysis found that new entry was concentrated around Bitcoin price spikes, and lower-income users tended to enter later in a run-up and at higher prices.

Inflation: A weaker, contested motive

While hedging against inflation may be a motivating factor, especially in other countries, there is little evidence of a link between exposure to inflation and crypto adoption in the U.S. An NBER working paper by Aiello and colleagues, analyzing bank-account transaction data, found that households with more exposure to inflation increased their crypto investment in both amount and frequency — especially during the 2021–2023 inflation surge. But the same households increased their traditional investments even more. The evidence suggests inflation pushed people toward investing generally, with crypto treated as one hedge among several, rather than revealing a distinctly crypto-driven motive. Whatever investors believed, Bitcoin’s subsequent performance did not reward the hedge: it fell sharply as inflation peaked in 2022.

Institutional distrust versus higher risk appetite

The first component of the financial-nihilism story, institutional distrust, finds little support. A BIS survey study found no evidence that U.S. crypto investors are primarily motivated by distrust of fiat currency or regulated finance. Crypto investors did not differ much from the general population in their security concerns about cash or commercial banking, though they were more likely to be young, educated, and digitally oriented.

The second component of the financial nihilism claim — the belief that big risks are now necessary to reach financial goals — is suggested by survey data, though without direct comparison to crypto activity. FINRA’s 2024 investor survey finds that 62% of investors under 35 say they need to take big risks to reach their financial goals.

The Urban Institute’s January 2026 survey finds that 65% of Gen Z respondents believe their generation faces tougher financial circumstances than earlier ones, and 52% believe their generation must take more financial risks. The same survey finds that respondents who trade retail investments were substantially more likely than non-investors to say their generation must take more risks to reach its financial goals (54% versus 35%).

Figure 6

A wider trend of speculative investing and gambling

Whatever the motive, crypto trading sits inside a broader and growing cluster of speculative financial behaviors. A 2024 study in the Journal of Gambling Studies using a cross-sectional U.S. online panel of 822 adults found moderate-to-strong positive intercorrelations among cryptocurrency trading, day trading, gambling behavior, and gambling risk. FINRA’s 2024 investor survey points to a broader risk profile among investors under 35. For instance, 43% reported trading options, 22% reported buying on margin, and 61% said they make investment decisions based on influencer recommendations.

We still lack conclusive evidence on how crypto overlaps with sports betting, prediction markets, online gambling, gaming, and retail day trading among young American men — whether the same young men move across these products, whether one behavior precedes another, and which product features drive escalation.

Attitudes: Skeptical, ambivalent, and engaged anyway

Skepticism about crypto is widespread, including among traders. Pew found in 2024 that 63% of U.S. adults had little or no confidence that current ways to invest in, trade, or use cryptocurrency were reliable and safe; even among those who had invested, 39% said the same. Gallup’s 2025 survey found that 87% of Americans considered cryptocurrency at least somewhat risky, including 55% who considered it very risky. Current owners were less alarmed, though 42% still considered it very risky.

An April 2026 YouGov survey found that men were more likely than women to say crypto would be good for society — but only 33% of men said so, while 43% said it would be bad and 24% were unsure.

Figure 7

A 2026 AIBM/Ipsos poll found that 91% of respondents who had heard of cryptocurrency said investing in it was very or somewhat risky. But when asked whether purchasing cryptocurrency is closer to gambling or investing, views were divided: 27% said gambling, 29% said investing, and 32% said a mix of both.

Figure 8

Financial outcomes: Returns, fraud, and problem use

Similar to the preceding section, the evidence below describes crypto users and consumers generally, not young men specifically, as few studies disaggregate by age and sex. Because young men use crypto at the highest rates, they are the most exposed to crypto’s risks and rewards.

Financial outcomes are uneven

Overall exposure is modest for most participants. In the JPMorgan Chase Institute’s checking-account data, the median user’s cumulative transfers into crypto accounts across the full 2015–2022 observation window amounted to less than one week’s take-home pay (roughly $620 against median take-home pay of about $48,000). More recent data show that about 80% of users have transferred less than one month’s pay in total, while roughly one in five has committed more than a month’s pay. For most, crypto is a modest, occasional bet, while for a meaningful minority, the exposure is substantial.

Pew’s surveys in 2022 and 2024 document self-reported investment outcomes among crypto investors. The figures do not measure actual returns, but they show experiences that are neither uniformly positive nor uniformly negative, and that track the market cycle: in 2022, after Bitcoin’s downturn, 46% of crypto investors reported worse than expected returns, compared to 15% who reported better than expected; in 2024, after its recovery, 38% reported worse than expected returns, compared to 20% who reported better than expected returns.

Figure 9

Fraud

Fraud is the most clearly documented harm, and young men’s higher participation implies higher exposure to crypto-adjacent fraud: phishing, fake investment groups, undisclosed paid promotions, and pump-and-dump schemes.

The Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, with investment scams — spanning both crypto-and fiat-denominated schemes — accounting for $5.7 billion. Measured by payment method, cryptocurrency was involved in 9% of non-credit-card fraud cases, a smaller share than debit cards or peer-to-peer payment apps. But among adults who experienced fraud involving crypto, 65% lost money that was not recovered.

Trading intensity and problem use

The psychological literature is consistent in direction but almost entirely correlational. A 2023 scoping review in Addictive Behaviors found associations between cryptocurrency trading engagement or intensity and problem-gambling symptoms, and noted overlap among crypto traders, high-risk stock traders, and problem gamblers. It found mixed evidence on depression and anxiety.

A 2024 correlational study in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction of 487 crypto investors — a modest, non-representative sample — found that adverse outcomes attributed to crypto speculation were associated with fear of missing out (FOMO), impulsivity, and problem-gambling scores. The frequency of checking crypto prices was associated with financial, psychological, health, and relationship difficulties, though effects were generally small.

Policy principles: Target the highest-risk products and practices

Debates over how to regulate crypto involve legitimate tradeoffs between consumer protection and innovation, privacy, and individual choice. Analysts at think tanks have come to various perspectives. Researchers at Brookings highlight undisclosed influencer payments, celebrity promotion, pump-and-dump schemes, and exchanges that combine brokerage, custody, and market-making functions. They favor stronger separation between crypto and essential financial institutions such as banks, retirement plans, and public funds. Researchers at the Cato Institute emphasize market competition, payment innovation, and relief from capital-gains taxes on small transactions. Researchers at the Urban Institute take a middle position, supporting access alongside better disclosures, advertising standards, recourse, and strategic friction.

The evidence reviewed in this brief points toward that middle course. This brief does not endorse specific bills or regulatory measures; instead it offers five principles for effective consumer protection without stifling innovation or choice. First, harms concentrate where trading intensity is highest, and so a risk-tiered approach would distinguish between buy-and-hold ownership versus leveraged trading and memecoin speculation. Second, rulemaking should require clear mechanisms for reporting fraud and recovering assets. Third, marketing rules should require prominent disclosure of paid promotions and prohibit misleading claims about returns, safety, or government backing. Fourth, crypto and speculative assets should not enter default retirement savings vehicles where consumers did not knowingly choose them. Finally, rulemaking ought to ensure transparency and manage conflicts of interest; exchanges, brokers, and coin issuers should be obligated to disclose fees, volatility, conflicts of interest, and bankruptcy treatment.

Current legislation only partly addresses these considerations. The proposed CLARITY Act establishes a market-structure framework that includes issuer disclosure requirements and preserved anti-fraud authority, but defers leverage and margin questions to future rulemaking. Its consumer-protection provisions consist mainly of educational materials and a financial-literacy study. It does not address cooling-off periods, promotional and advertising practices, or patterns of escalation among young adults. A sensible policy framework would balance consumer safeguards with individual choice by prioritizing oversight on leverage, conflicts of interest, fraud, and patterns of high-risk escalation.

A research agenda for young men and crypto

Few studies reviewed in this brief disaggregate findings by age and sex, and none follows the same young men over time. The research agenda below is organized as questions, with notes on methods.

What explains the gender gap?

Is the gender gap in crypto simply general male risk-tolerance expressed in a new asset class, or does something about crypto specifically appeal to young men? Gender-disaggregated motivation surveys and qualitative work with young male users would begin to answer the question that runs through this entire brief.

Who owns, who trades, and how intensively?

No national survey cleanly separates ownership from trading intensity or product type. Future surveys should oversample young men and standardize plain-language distinctions among holding, trading, leveraged trading, and product type.

Who experiences losses, how, and through which channels?

Research on financial outcomes could combine survey data with linked financial and device-use data, which would better measure deposits, withdrawals, realized gains and losses, trading frequency, and substitution away from savings.

Does crypto trading cause distress, or attract the already-at-risk?

We do not know whether crypto trading worsens financial distress, mental health, sleep, or gambling behavior, or whether people already prone to risk and distress select into crypto. Longitudinal studies could measure baseline risk tolerance, gambling history, loneliness, financial stress, institutional trust, and social-media exposure, then track later crypto activity and outcomes. Natural experiments could complement panels; realistic shocks include major price crashes and the failure of specific coins, platforms, or projects.

Do risk-necessity beliefs drive adoption?

The “financial nihilism” debate cannot be settled with existing data. Studies should directly measure beliefs about economic prospects and the necessity of risk-taking (distinguished from institutional distrust) and link those beliefs to subsequent crypto activity in the same young men.

How do influencers and peer networks shape behavior?

Survey experiments could test how young men respond to influencer claims, alleged profit screenshots, peer-participation cues, warning labels, cooling-off prompts, and loss disclosures.

What does underage exposure look like?

We know little about crypto adoption by teen boys. A 2025 Common Sense Media nationally representative survey of teen boys found that 3% reported having purchased or used cryptocurrency. Further studies could distinguish passive exposure from attempts to trade, wallet ownership, use of parents’ accounts, and crypto gambling. Measurement challenges include underreporting and ambiguity about what teens count as “crypto,” especially when tokens, NFTs, skins, in-game currencies, and gambling products blur together.

Conclusion

Crypto has become a common speculative investment. Young men are its most concentrated users, and much of today’s user base appears to be a cohort that entered during the 2020–2021 boom and aged with the asset class.

On motives, the evidence is more modest than public debate suggests. The best-documented driver is price momentum — people buy when prices rise — likely amplified by peers and influencers. Institutional distrust finds little support as an explanation. But the belief that outsized risks are now necessary to get ahead is consistent with survey evidence and deserves further examination.

Financial outcomes among crypto users are uneven and likely track the market cycle. The most clearly documented adverse outcomes are fraud — where crypto’s unrecovered-loss rate is the highest of any payment method — and the correlational link between trading intensity and problem-gambling symptoms. For most owners, crypto appears to be a modest, occasional bet. Whether a subset of young men use it as one of several high-intensity speculative products — alongside day trading, options, sports betting, and prediction markets — and to what effect is precisely what deserves further research.

Until research separates ownership from trading intensity, and tracks how crypto interacts with gambling, prediction markets, and day trading in the same young men over time, consumer protection guardrails will target a population we have measured only approximately.

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Key takeaways

Introduction