Investors vs. payers: who really holds crypto in the Euro Area?
In this paper, Alejandro Zamora-Pérez analyzes the behaviors and preferences of crypto-asset users in the euro area. The author employs a three-stage empirical strategy:
- Probit/LPM models establish the socio-demographic and behavioral profile of crypto owners, using the 2022 ECB SPACE survey (39,507 adults, 17 euro area countries).
- Two-stage Heckman-type probit separately models the ownership decision and the payment use decision, treating them as distinct choices.
- Instrumental Variable (IV) bivariate probit addresses the endogeneity of cash-holding by exploiting five COVID-19-era payment shocks (e.g., ATM inaccessibility, fear of banknote contagion) as instruments. These shocks are unrelated to crypto preferences, isolating the causal effect of precautionary cash-building on crypto ownership.
Findings
- Owners and payers are two distinct groups: Crypto owners are younger, predominantly male, more educated, financially sophisticated, and hold larger precautionary cash reserves. They value both cash-like privacy and card-like speed, a mixed profile that straddles speculative investment and store-of-value demand. Crypto payers (only 1.4% of the euro area adult population) are a much narrower, cash-centric subset. Their payment use is driven by a desire to replicate cash’s privacy and ease of use in digital form, not by the speed or convenience of cards.
- The ownership–payment wedge: The gap between widespread ownership and negligible payment use is not merely a merchant-acceptance problem. It reflects fundamentally different user motivations: investors dominate the ownership base, while only a niche transactional subgroup, seeking a cash substitute, actually uses crypto at the point of sale.
- Cash and crypto are complements in normal times but substitutes under stress when building a precautionary cash buffer reduces the probability of owning crypto by approximately 10 percentage points. This sign reversal indicates that under uncertainty, households substitute toward the safety of central bank money and away from volatile private assets.
- Policy implications: Regulation should focus primarily on investor protection, given that the vast majority of crypto owners are speculative investors, not transactors. For CBDC design, the preferences of the niche payer group are most relevant: they want privacy, simplicity, and offline resilience. The findings confirm that cash remains a superior safe-haven asset even for tech-savvy individuals, which helps explain the persistent euro area demand for banknotes despite financial digitalization.
Who owns crypto in the euro area? Drivers of crypto adoption, payment use, and its interaction with fiat cash
Author: Alejandro Zamora-Pérez
From: ECB
Investors vs. payers: who really holds crypto in the US?
Two complementary data sources cover the US landscape:
- The paper by Juan M. Sánchez and Masataka Mori uses the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances to estimate the distribution of crypto holdings across households. Crypto is identified via an “other assets” module, with bootstrapping used to compute 90% confidence intervals.
- The paper by Fumiko Hayashi and Aditi Routh uses the Federal Reserve’s annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which explicitly asks whether consumers own crypto as an investment, used it to buy something, or used it to send money to friends or family. This three-way split enables a clean investor/payer distinction, tracked longitudinally from 2021 to 2024.
Findings
- Ownership rates and concentration: About 4.3% of US households held crypto in 2022, with extreme concentration: the median holder owned just $2,000, while the 95th percentile held $92,400. Overall ownership (any purpose) declined from 12.3% in 2021 to 8.4% in 2024.
- Investors dominate while payers are a small and shrinking minority: The vast majority of crypto holders own it purely as an investment. Only 1.9% of US adults used crypto for payments in 2024, down from nearly 3% in 2021–22, a decline driven mainly by fewer peer-to-peer money transfers.
- Who are the payers? Crypto payers skew toward financially marginalized groups: Black and Hispanic consumers, non-citizens, the unbanked, alternative financial service users, and those with poor credit scores were all significantly more likely to pay with crypto than white, banked, or higher-income consumers. Self-employed workers and family business owners also stand out as more likely to use crypto transactionally.
- Payment motivation is increasingly passive: In 2022, the top reasons for paying with crypto were roughly evenly split: payee preference, speed, and privacy. By 2024, payee preference had surged to 35%, while privacy and speed declined, indicating that crypto payment use has become increasingly reactive rather than driven by active user choice.
- In financial literacy, payers lag investors: Unlike the ECB paper’s finding that payers are a distinct privacy-seeking niche, the US evidence shows crypto payers are less financially literate than both crypto investors and non-owners, suggesting payers are not sophisticated adopters but rather financially underserved users pushed toward crypto by circumstance.
U.S. Consumers’ Use of Cryptocurrency for Payments
Authors: Fumiko Hayashi, Aditi Routh
From: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City
Cryptocurrency Ownership among U.S. Households
Authors: Juan M. Sánchez, Masataka Mori
From: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
