Crypto: New survey details how many U.S. investors are interested in bitcoin

Yahoo Finance Video
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Yahoo Finance's David Hollerith discusses investing in crypto and how NFT collections have exploded in 2021.

Video Transcript

- More people are investing in Bitcoin than ever before according to a new survey out of Grayscale. Yahoo Finance Crypto Reporter David Hollerith is here with more. David.

DAVID HOLLERITH: Hey, Brian. Yeah, so Grayscale commissioned this poll polling about 1,000 Americans online, and it's shown that back in August, this slice of Americans that-- about 26% of the population, bought into Bitcoin in 2020 and-- sorry, let me correct that. So 26% of Americans own Bitcoin, and 59% of the cohort bought in this year. So a few things we're seeing, trends we're seeing. This survey was conducted before the ETFs launched in October, but 77% of respondents said that they'd be more interested in investing into Bitcoin if there was some sort of ETF for which they could get exposure. Also too, online trading apps are, by no surprise, they're on the rise. Just compared to 2020, the majority of-- of users of cryptocurrency are using these trading apps as opposed to buying directly from an online Bitcoin exchange.

- Yeah, and David, something else. It's really interesting that not only have we seen this explosion in interest for Bitcoin, for other cryptocurrencies, there then is the whole NFT market as well. And you are out with an article on some new research on the size of that market, which I think that research found was $27 billion?

DAVID HOLLERITH: Yeah, so the report came out from Chainalysis, which is a blockchain forensics company. And so they found-- they valued sort of the money flowing to NFT collections and marketplaces like OpenSea to be $27 billion. So that's-- that's huge. And then of that majority, the majority came from OpenSea, the largest NFT market. It held $16 billion in trading volume-- or sorry, in $16 billion in-- in volume sent to that platform.

So the report also found that there's some unique patterns about what makes the best NFT investor. And a lot of those details are pretty interesting, because it does seem like you can actually get a significant return if you're really active in the NFT markets. But I think another development that just sort of speaks to this report is just the fact that NFTs do-- there's the newest-- one of the newer segments of cryptocurrency, and there's a ton of hype surrounding them. And I guess, some of this volume, some of this reported volume that's been tracked, is a little bit more proof that there is a big explosion in popularity at least investing in this area.

- Well, for it's worth, I'm going to stick to investing in watches. That's just my thing. Yahoo Finance's Crypto Reporter David Hollerith, good to see you.