ECB study finds euro area crypto owners chase returns while crypto payers seek cash-like privacy

An ECB working paper surveying 39,507 adults across 17 euro area countries finds that roughly 9.7% of households own crypto, but the people who hold it and the people who actually pay with it are fundamentally different groups. Crypto owners skew younger, male, and financially active with speculative motivations, while crypto payers display a cash-centric profile seeking to replicate physical cash's privacy and ease of use in digital form. The most striking finding: using an instrumental variable strategy tied to pandemic payment shocks, the researchers show that building precautionary cash buffers under uncertainty causally reduces the probability of crypto ownership by about 10 percentage points — suggesting cash and crypto compete as safety assets when stress hits, even if they coexist in portfolios during calm periods.

TLDR by @Benthic

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