With all cryptocurrency markets seeing substantial growth this year, global interest in this new form of money has increased. A new report by LendEDU shows the extent to which people are actually investing in cryptocurrencies and ICOs. Although only 1,000 Americans were surveyed, the results paint a very interesting picture. It seems a lot of altcoins still have their work cut out for them in terms of education and awareness.
LendEDU Survey Shows Bitcoin is King
Most cryptocurrency traders who have been in the game for more than a few months are all too aware of how altcoins struggle for mainstream traction. Hyping a particular cryptocurrency on social media doesn’t mean it will gain any general awareness whatsoever. Moreover, all of those flavor-of-the-month tokens and assets aren’t going to stick with the general public either. In this regard, it is good to see LendEDU focus on currencies people may actually be familiar with outside of Bitcoin.
First of all, the survey touched upon Ethereum. While the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization seems to be on a lot of people’s minds, this survey shows things aren’t all that rosy. More specifically, over 68% of respondents had no idea what Ethereum was, nor did they recognize “Eth” or the ETH ticker symbol. That in itself is quite troublesome, especially for a currency with a market cap of over US$27 billion right now.
Surprisingly, a lot of people also have no intention of investing in Ethereum. While 18.2% of respondents said they planned to do exactly that, 37.8% were unsure until they knew more about it. The average person on the street may not necessarily see the benefits of a developer-oriented platform such as Ethereum. Moreover, a lot of projects built on top of this ecosystem have their own token or currency, which makes ETH less interesting to invest in right now. A whopping 44% of respondents claimed they would not invest in Ether whatsoever.
The same statistics apply to Ripple and its XRP digital asset. Almost half of all respondents said they wouldn’t invest in the latter, and over one in three people weren’t sure as to what they would do. Both ETH and XRP, which are currently among the top 3 by market cap, fail to capture the attention of average people. That’s not surprising, considering neither Ethereum nor Ripple is performing remotely like Bitcoin. There is no real sense in comparing these three either.
Last but not least, the LendEDU survey touched upon the concept of initial coin offerings. ICOs are a very troubled industry right now due to a lack of regulation and the fact they’re effectively banned in various countries. 75.1% of respondents indicated they had no idea what an ICO is, nor did they seem to care all that much. There was also a lot of uncertainty when it came to investing in an ICO as a resident of the US. 61.1% of Americans were unsure whether or not this would be legal to begin with. Indeed, there is no official answer to this question right now.
All of this goes to show that cryptocurrency is still not all that appealing to the everyday person right now. That situation will not be changing anytime soon, by the look of things. Bitcoin is still struggling for mainstream traction these days, to say nothing of the challenges faced by alternative cryptocurrencies.
