A consumer study carried out by Grayscale Investments suggests that the COVID’19 pandemic has led to increased interest in Bitcoin for investors.
Grayscale, considered the largest cryptocurrency digital asset manager in the world, carried out the study with the help of 8 Acre Perspective between June and July 2020. The online survey included 1000 United States based consumers.
The respondents were aged between 25 and 64, primarily responsible for financial decisions and involved in ‘some form of personal investing’. They had over $10000 investable assets and brought in over $50000 in yearly income.
2020 has seen renewed interest in Bitcoin
One of the first insights delivered by the report is the increased interest in Bitcoin from investors in 2020.
55% of investors indicated they were interested in investing in Bitcoin in 2020, which was an increase in percentage from the 36% that admitted interest in the cryptocurrency the previous year.
A large majority of investors had also made investments in Bitcoin within the past twelve months which is another indicator of the attraction to digital asset exposure in modern investment portfolios.
Grayscale’s report estimates that the market of potential Bitcoin investors is around 32 million people in the United States. The percentage of investors ‘familiar’ with Bitcoin has also increased by 10 percent year on year while nearly 50 percent of survey respondents felt that digital currencies will ‘be regarded as mainstream’ by 2030.
COVID-19 has increased Bitcoin’s popularity
Investor sentiment has been heavily influenced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which has hamstrung economies since early 2020. While traditional markets and a variety of businesses around the world have struggled, others have benefitted in some way from changes to everyday life.
Bitcoin seems to have benefitted somewhat from the prevailing pandemic and Grayscale’s report shows that more than 66 percent of survey respondents that had invested in Bitcoin in the past four months were influenced by the COVID-19 situation.
The report outlines a number of reasons why Bitcoin has become more attractive to investors. Respondents indicated that Bitcoin shares similar attributes to other safe haven investments.
“Bitcoin’s scarcity, verifiable nature, lack of correlation to global markets, and the fact that it isn’t controlled by government organizations are attributes that make Bitcoin similar to traditional safe haven investments.”
