To What Extent Does the“In Crypto We Trust” Mantra Hold?

Trust is the first thing you need to drive the adoption of your product.

Over the years of the formation of the crypto market, many new entities, services, and tokens have appeared. The BDC Consulting team set itself the task of determining how the audience relates to the existing institutions and directions of the crypto market and what their trust is made of. To do this, we conducted a study in which more than 2,000 users from 60 countries participated. We also compiled a rating based on the trust level.

How were we able to assess user trust?

We developed a unique user trust structure and an attached trust index to conduct the study. As a result, it helped to determine the general level of trust in various directions and explain what it consists of.

We have identified five main components of overall trust:

• Previous experience;
• The notion of honesty;
• Competence;
• Predictability;
• Willingness to rely on (trust).

Based on the answers for these categories, we have formed a general Trust Index (hereinafter referred to as TI), which answers the question, “which areas, participants, and institutions of the crypto market are most trusted by users?”.

In this article, we share some insights from our research to introduce it briefly. If you can’t wait to read the full version, it’s available here.

Crypto Users – Who Are They?

During the study, we collected a large amount of data about the components of trust and crypto users in general.

Income of Crypto Users

The overwhelming majority (76.13%) are employed in one way or another. Half of them earn less than $2,000 a month, which is explained by the audience’s geographical distribution – Asia accounts for 45%. In general, the income of the average cryptocurrency user is at the level of the average income for the region in which he lives.

Audience Gender and Age

Contrary to the perceptions of many, almost 40% of the audience are adults over 35 years old. Remarkably, the number of female users increases every year.

Market Behavior

The most common activities are holding (51.3%) and trading (45.4%). The popularity of staking (30.2%) is close to that of mining (32.1%), which is especially important in light of the recent transition of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Who Do Crypto Users Trust?

To conduct the analysis, we divided the market entities into four main categories: sources of information, participants, assets, and various services. Now let’s look at each of them separately to understand why users tend to trust (or distrust?) them.

Crypto Services

Modern crypto services, such as payment systems, exchangers, and wallets, have long been comparable in convenience to financial applications. Often, a crypto exchanger becomes much more convenient than its fiat counterparts. Wallets, payment systems, exchangers, and marketplaces received a trust index of more than 70 points, indicating a high user loyalty level.

Users have identified predictability as one of the most important components of service trust. On the contrary, the previous experience of crypto users rarely affects the trust level in this category, which indicates a great openness to the new.

Sources of Information

Telegram channels, community chats, and crypto bloggers with a good reputation received the highest scores on our Trust Index – over 66.71 points. Based on the data we obtained, a key factor in the credibility of sources of information is the honesty and competence of the authors.

It is worth noting that people who allegedly provide “insights” and “signals” are the least trusted. The level of trust in these counterparties is almost at the very bottom of the overall rating, which may indicate a good level of awareness and education of the crypto audience.

Market participants

Under the market participants, we explored some subjects that make up or impact the market’s structure. Exchanges (especially large ones), teams, and founders of crypto projects gained the highest level of trust in this category, receiving more than 66 points in our rating.

In last place was govt regulators (58.57 points), but this result is still positive in terms of confidence.

Information from exchanges, crypto teams, and factual information is valuable in the eyes of most users, as evidenced by the statistics below:

Trusted assets

No one will be surprised that such titans as BTC and ETH are the absolute champions of our rating among the most trusted cryptocurrencies. Taking the first line of the overall rating, they have a confidence index of 80.29.

It is noteworthy that despite minimal volatility and full backing, stablecoins lag behind the largest coins by four positions in our trust ranking, scoring 71. However, this is still a high level of trust.

It is typical for this category that the trust of crypto investors depends not so much on the risk that the asset will turn out to be a scam but on its ability to generate income. For example, it is not so important whether an NFT is a scam if it is profitable to invest in.

And Yet – In Crypto We Trust!

The study showed that, collectively, the audience of the crypto industry is loyal to all the main elements and other components of the crypto market. None of the market components received a low trust index, most likely due to the specifics of the respondents and the crypto audience in general.

Thus, we can conclude that the audience is more inclined to trust crypto and its services.

For even more insightful insights, check out our full report, which details the positions and structure that explain why users tend to trust a particular category.