Over the past decade, cryptocurrency has gained a significant foothold in the US financial system, with popular narratives suggesting that young, wealthy white men have driven this growth. However, new Urban Institute research presents a more complex picture.

In a survey conducted in January 2026, we find that roughly 1 in 5 US adults own or have owned cryptocurrency. Among this group, 24 percent are age 50 or older, 25 percent have incomes below $50,000, and 33 percent are people of color.

Most of these people (68 percent) say they use cryptocurrency primarily for investment purposes, with many reporting a desire to diversify their portfolio. This suggests people may use cryptocurrency as just one of several strategies to build wealth. These data raise important questions about what safeguards are needed, especially as more people turn to cryptocurrency.

Thea Garon, director of the Financial Well-Being Hub at the Urban Institute, spoke with Kennan Cepa, director of research and policy at SaverLife, a nonprofit that helps more than 770,000 members navigate financial decisions, to better understand these trends.

Cryptocurrency use among SaverLife’s members—most of whom are people living primarily on low to moderate incomes—can deepen our understanding of how and why people are using cryptocurrency for wealth-building purposes.

Some people report turning to cryptocurrency because they feel it’s more trustworthy than traditional financial services. What have you heard from your members about their motivations?

What we’ve heard is that in a general sense, yes, they feel like they’re being squeezed and taken advantage of by big institutions. Sometimes that’s government, sometimes that’s corporations, but they feel like these big institutions are passing down expenses and keeping the profits. And that feeling seems to bubble up when they talk about banks and financial institutions getting a cut through fees or fines or interest.

The interesting thing is that they don’t seem to feel the same way when it comes to crypto. Of course, they know profit is being made by exchanges, but it seems different. It’s certainly an interesting question, and we need to probe more about why they feel less taken advantage of in the context of crypto.

How effective are cryptocurrency avenues for long-term savings?

One in five SaverLife members are holding some of their retirement savings in crypto, but the amount is quite modest. The median amount is about $500 [roughly 2 percent of members’ median retirement savings]. So the question is, how does that appreciate and grow to be true wealth building, assuming that’s the goal in mind? There have been some really interesting studies lately that have started to tackle this question.

There’s one by the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] that investigated the spillover effects of crypto on other wealth-building vehicles (PDF). It found that crypto gains often got reinvested in traditional brokerage accounts and that those with especially large crypto gains were more likely to go from renting to homeownership. Also, there were implications for property values in the area where a lot of wealth was generated from crypto.

I think there’s some interesting things about this study in that it means that crypto is used in service of long-term wealth-building goals as a short stop of quickly transforming some money into greater gains that can then be ported over to more traditional wealth-building tools.

What are you advising or thinking about when it comes to the risks of cryptocurrency?

Our members are savvy and aware of the risks here. They have said really poignantly that they feel like they need money to build wealth but that the margins for taking that risk are extraordinarily slim. If we look at crypto through that lens, the risks associated with it can be viewed as a different flavor of the risks our members are navigating day in and day out to building wealth through other avenues like entrepreneurship, homeownership, or investing.

For some of us, crypto feels really scary because the risks are so front and center. But for our members, they’re already seeing that risk in many other parts of their financial lives as well.

What do you see as the short-term and the long-term options where regulation can fit in?

We’ve heard from our members that they want to preserve some of the benefits of crypto, which in their minds are its ease of use and the accessibility of funds. But while we preserve these benefits, it’s crucial that we’re curtailing bad actors and minimizing some of the risks. We know that frauds and scams are real, concerning risks in the crypto space, and our members know it.

We’ve talked to members broadly about what it would mean for them to feel like these types of needs were being met by policy. So what’s the policy that can be designed that helps them feel a sense of trust that their needs around crypto are being met and that their best interest is being taken to heart?

They’ve shared with us a roadmap at a high level that I think is applicable here. When it comes to policy that’s meeting their needs, we often hear that they really want avenues for them to be quickly made whole again after something outside of their control, like a scam or a fraud, takes place. I think that’s a simple ask. A way to build trust that these policies are actually designed with their needs in mind.

In order to make good policy, it’s imperative for us to have a clear understanding of what people across the income spectrum want from crypto. What promise do they see in it? It’s not enough to say that some groups are just less interested in it without interrogating the motivations of the people who are using it but don’t conform to the demographics of the typical user.

We need to understand whether these goals are being achieved in practice. That insight can help shape policies that build on what’s already working. We need to build out those individual footpaths into paved highways with appropriate guardrails.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency with Urban Institute editorial style.