About one in ten American adults used or held cryptocurrency in 2025, up from 7% in 2024, as spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs helped pull retail investors back into digital assets, according to new Federal Reserve data.
Summary
- Fed’s 2025 household survey finds 10% of U.S. adults used or held crypto, up from 7% in 2024
- Roughly 7% held crypto as an investment, making it the dominant use case
- Usage is concentrated among under‑45s and higher‑income households, with payments use still below 2%
According to FinanceFeeds and a breakdown published by crypto.news, the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) shows that 10% of U.S. adults reported using or holding cryptocurrency in 2025, up from 7% in 2024 and marking the highest share since 2022. The Fed’s numbers, based on a nationally representative sample of nearly 13,000 adults surveyed in October 2025, indicate that crypto participation has rebounded from the post‑FTX slump but remains below the 12% peak seen in 2021–2022.
The survey finds that about 7% of American adults held cryptocurrency as an investment in 2025, making “investment exposure” by far the largest participation category. Only a small additional share used crypto primarily for payments or money transfers, echoing earlier Fed work showing that U.S. consumers overwhelmingly treat digital assets as speculative investment rather than as everyday money. The Fed’s findings are broadly consistent with third‑party polling, such as a 2026 Security.org report estimating around 30% of Americans have ever owned crypto but a smaller active user base, underscoring how many retail participants treat coins as longer‑term holdings rather than high‑frequency payment tools.
ETFs help pull retail back into crypto
The Fed report explicitly links the 2025 rebound in crypto participation to the launch and rapid growth of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, which created a more familiar, brokerage‑friendly on‑ramp for retail investors. As crypto.news notes in its summary of the Fed data, “the approval and growth of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have influenced the rebound in retail participation,” with many households gaining exposure through brokerage and retirement accounts instead of directly via exchanges. That dynamic echoes earlier analyses from ETF and derivatives desks, which highlighted that the 2024–2025 cycle saw record flows into spot products even as direct exchange activity lagged pre‑crash peaks.
Demographically, the SHED data show that crypto use is most concentrated among adults under 45 and households with incomes above the national median, a pattern that has held since the Fed first began asking about digital assets in 2021. Younger, higher‑income respondents are more likely to report holding crypto as an investment, while lower‑income households are underrepresented among active investors even when controlling for age, according to Fed and regional‑Fed analyses of earlier survey waves. That skew partly reflects the higher risk tolerance and tech familiarity of younger, wealthier cohorts, and mirrors prior Pew and OANDA research showing outsized crypto participation among men aged 18–29 and higher‑income investors.
Payments use stays marginal despite higher ownership
Despite the uptick in overall adoption, the role of cryptocurrency in everyday consumer payments remains small. A recent Kansas City Fed briefing using SHED data found that the share of U.S. consumers who use cryptocurrency for payments—purchases, money transfers, or both—has stayed below 3% since 2021 and fell to under 2% in 2023–2024, driven mainly by a drop in people using crypto just to send money to friends and family. The 2025 survey continues to show that most Americans who touch crypto do so as investors: in earlier Fed work, 11% reported using crypto for investment versus only 2% for payments or remittances in 2021–2022, and that basic split has persisted even as overall participation fluctuated.
Taken together, the new SHED data suggest that by 2025 crypto in the U.S. is settling into a dual identity: a mainstream, ETF‑accessible investment product for roughly one in ten adults, and a niche payments tool used by well under one in twenty. Whether that balance shifts in coming years will likely depend less on raw price cycles and more on how deeply spot ETFs, stablecoins and new regulatory frameworks embed digital assets into the broader financial system—something crypto.news and others will be tracking closely as fresh Fed survey waves arrive.
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