Trump's Big Bitcoin Push Still Hasn't Won Over Investors

Bitcoin's mass-adoption moment, the one crypto evangelists and Washington insiders have been promising for years, may have already come and gone. A new report released on July 9 by the Urban Institute found that just 9% of American adults currently own cryptocurrency, down from around 12% at its 2021 peak, despite President Donald Trump's sweeping campaign to put digital assets into ETFs, retirement accounts, and the national spotlight.

America's Crypto Ownership Is Going Backward

The Urban Institute numbers are worth sitting with. Roughly 17% of American adults have owned crypto at some point, but only 9% still do. Half walked away. The research drew from a survey of more than 3,000 adults in January, and what it shows is a market that isn't growing, isn't stabilizing, it's contracting.

According to the Urban Institute's report on how Americans use emerging financial technologies, these findings track closely with data from the Federal Reserve's own annual survey on Economic Well-Being. The Fed's most recent reading, from May, puts crypto usage at 10% of adults in 2025. Adoption data from earlier surveys suggests the peak actually came four years ago, in 2021, when 12% of Americans bought, sold, held, or otherwise used digital currencies.

Contrast that with stocks: roughly 62% of Americans own equities. Despite years of crypto advocacy, ETF approvals, and presidential cheerleading, digital assets remain a fringe investment, and the fringe appears to be shrinking.

People still view it as a more specialized asset class. And I think that volatility and these periodic huge declines are still probably keeping people away.

Why Is Bitcoin Losing Its Retail Investors?

The price collapse is the obvious culprit. Bitcoin has fallen from around $125,000 in October 2025 to approximately $65,000 in late July 2026, a drop of nearly 48% in nine months. For retail investors who bought anywhere near the top, that's not a dip. That's a disaster.

"By definition, that means that people are selling," said Caleb Silver, editor in chief of Investopedia. "And that likely means that people who may have experimented in buying it have decided that they don't want to own it anymore, because they've seen the price crash."

Former crypto holders make that pattern explicit. About 8% of Americans surveyed said they no longer own crypto. Those ex-investors were more likely than current holders to have bought primarily to make money, and they stopped primarily because they were losing it. The motive was profit. The outcome was loss.

There's also a deeper accessibility problem that doesn't get enough attention. "If you understand how crypto works, that's OK," said Luisa Godinez-Puig, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. "But for a lot of people, crypto is a bit of a mystery. It comes with a bit of a learning curve." Spot Bitcoin ETFs only became available to ordinary investors in January 2024, giving retail traders a streamlined on-ramp. Retirement account access is newer still, and far from settled.

There are many investors who bought crypto over the last 15 years who were simply chasing price.

Trump's Crypto Crusade, Who's Actually Winning?

Here's what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. Trump signed a 2025 executive order on cryptocurrency that called for federal regulation of digital currencies and introduced the idea of a national cryptocurrency stockpile, while his Labor Department separately proposed a rule that would ease existing legal and regulatory barriers against adding crypto and alternative investments to employer-sponsored retirement plans. He pledged to make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet."

His family businesses earned $1.4 billion from crypto projects in 2025 alone, according to The New York Times.

That gap, between the policy ambitions and who actually benefits, deserves harder scrutiny than it's getting. Critics of the proposed retirement account rule argue that cryptocurrency has no place in 401(k)s: it's volatile, poorly understood by most savers, and notoriously difficult to value. The administration pushing hardest for crypto access happens to be the one profiting most directly from it.

Alex Carchidi, a contributing cryptocurrency analyst at The Motley Fool, put it plainly: "There's not a big wave of new crypto investors. And in fact, many of the professional crypto investors... have been leaving the market or hibernating in some way since the market collapsed in October."

Who Still Holds Crypto, and What Do They Actually Own?

45% of current crypto investors say they hold digital assets to diversify their portfolios. Another 37% cite genuine interest in new technology. And 27% say they simply believe digital currencies are the future of money. These aren't speculators. They're believers, people who've been in the market for years and aren't planning to leave regardless of what the price does.

Most have held their positions for several years. Their balances are generally modest: two-fifths of all crypto investors own less than $250 in digital currency. The demographic profile hasn't changed much either, crypto skews male, skews young, and Asian Americans are significantly more likely to own digital assets than any other racial group.

The Urban Institute recommends that banks, exchanges, and crypto providers be required to publish "clear, standardized disclosures" about investment risks. Morningstar's Arnott put it more directly in a 2025 analysis: a crypto allocation of 5% or less is about as far as most portfolios should go, and plenty of investors, she suggested, should skip it altogether.

People in power wrote the regulations. They're making billions. The investors those rules were meant to help? Most of them already sold.