Fed survey: 10% of U.S. adults used or held crypto in 2025
By Andrew Folkler from Crypto.news
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.
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.
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.
Payments use stays marginal despite higher ownership
Despite the uptick in overall adoption, the role of cryptocurrency in everyday consumer payments remains small.
A 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 interact with crypto do so as investors, with the basic split between investment use and payments use persisting 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.
Source : https://crypto.news/fed-survey-10-of-u-s-adults-used-or-held-crypto-in-2025/
