Senior Advisor and Research Fellow, Consumer Finance Institute
August 2023
This research brief from the Consumer Finance Institute (CFI) presents findings from a consumer survey conducted in October 2022 to explore the effect of the crypto winter on crypto ownership among consumers.
In January 2022, the Consumer Finance Institute (CFI) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in conjunction with economists from the Federal Reserve Board, conducted a survey to establish a baseline understanding of the penetration that cryptocurrencies have achieved among consumers. Results from that survey were most recently published in April 2023.
In the months after the initial survey was conducted, the cryptocurrency market experienced what is known as a crypto winter, a prolonged bear market that resulted in a nearly $2 trillion loss in market value, coin and exchange collapses, and damage to a number of financial services firms that are closely aligned to the crypto space. This drastic change potentially led to a shift in attitudes regarding cryptocurrencies among owners and nonowners alike, particularly those who entered the crypto market since the end of the last crypto winter (2018‒2020).
This research brief presents the findings of a second survey conducted in October 2022 in which CFI included the same set of cryptocurrency questions.
