Bitcoin Gains Spur New Crypto Owners by 23%

A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has found that telling people about Bitcoin's recent gains can measurably increase the odds they end up owning crypto later on. The researchers randomly divided participants in a 2025 survey into a control group and six treatment groups, each receiving different information.

The ownership portion of the analysis drew on 5,352 respondents surveyed across the second through fourth quarters of 2025. Crucially, the researchers controlled for whether each person already owned crypto before receiving the information, isolating the effect of the new data itself rather than pre-existing interest.

Exposure to Bitcoin's return data raised the probability that respondents reported owning crypto in a later survey wave by 2.41 percentage points for one treatment and 2.48 percentage points for the other, depending on how the information was presented. Since roughly 11% of respondents already owned crypto before the experiment, that translates into a 23% relative increase in crypto ownership.