March 2023 Public Opinion Poll

While Washington sits on the sidelines, Americans want regulatory clarity on crypto. That’s the bottom line on a poll we recently conducted1 to better understand how Americans view crypto. Here are the key findings policymakers should note.

Takeaway 1: Americans have a strong desire for regulatory clarity around crypto but don’t have a clear preference for which party they trust more on crypto regulations.

65% said crypto needs more regulation and 76% supported “establish(ing) a government-wide standard… to create regulatory clarity.” Despite the strong support for regulatory clarity, there was no consensus on which party Americans trust more. 25% trusted Republicans more with cryptocurrency, 27% trusted Democrats more, and 43% trusted neither party more.2

These numbers suggest Americans don’t see crypto as a partisan issue. Neither do we.

Takeaway 2: Americans are excited about crypto’s ability to expand financial access to the underbanked and challenge the status quo of tech and finance.

The primary reasons3 people were most excited about crypto fell into three main categories:

Increasing access to the banking system (i.e. Ukraine aid / global remittances):

• 42% Crypto enables people who are not connected to the traditional banking system to transfer money securely

Technical advantages over legacy finance:

• 34% Crypto reduces the costs of transactions
• 30% Crypto enables transactions to be stored securely across multiple sources

Competition to incumbents:

• 32% Crypto creates alternatives to big banks and other Wall Street power brokers
• 19% Crypto creates competition with big tech companies

By far, the most popular current use case for crypto was increasing access to the banking system for unbanked and underbanked populations. Hundreds of millions of people around the globe don’t have access to secure banking and the events of the last few weeks should remind all of us to never take our access to checking accounts, credit cards, etc for granted.