In brief

  • The overwhelming majority of crypto holders are confident in digital assets, according to the latest survey report by Binance Research.
  • More than half of respondents said that they don't consider crypto investing a hobby.
  • Apart from investment opportunities, distrust of the current financial system is what drives people toward digital assets.

Roughly 97% of crypto users around the world have “near-unanimous confidence” in digital assets, according to the “2021 Global Crypto User Index” published by Binance Research today.

“According to the findings, there is a near-unanimous confidence in cryptocurrencies (97%) amongst users. More than half (52%) do not consider crypto investing as a hobby, but instead as a means of income; for 15% of users, crypto is considered their primary source of income,” said the report.

For its “first-ever” global report on crypto user motivations, Binance Research surveyed over 61,000 digital assets holders.

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As for motivations, the researchers noted that 55% of respondents are buying cryptocurrencies as part of their long-term investment strategy. At the same time, 38% of users turned to crypto because they don’t trust the existing financial system while 31% have entered the crypto market in search of short-term trading opportunities.

Bitcoin's price
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency. Image: Shutterstock

In terms of asset preferences, “Bitcoin continues to reign,” the report noted, as 65% of users who hold any crypto also have BTC to go along with it. At the same time, 30% of Bitcoin owners said that they usually allocate somewhere between 1-20% of their crypto portfolio in BTC.

The data also showed that most crypto enthusiasts are either just outright “hodling” their assets (39%) or locking them on staking and lending platforms (22%)—and only 11% are actually using their digital assets for payments. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that cryptocurrencies are losing the characteristics of money.

“While using crypto as a medium of exchange may not be perceived as the most important use-case (21%), actual usage (38%) suggests that crypto is taking the function of money more than users anticipate,” the researchers explained.

At the same time, decentralized finance (DeFi)—one of the best-performing and rapidly growing sectors in the crypto industry today—has already captivated roughly two-thirds of crypto users as 66% of respondents stated that they are already using DeFi applications, according to Binance Research.

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