Former US President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Saturday, July 27, 2024.
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Cryptocurrency adoption appears to have a political bent — and a significant gender divide.
Republicans have adopted crypto with more gusto than Democrats in recent years, data shows, coinciding with President Donald Trump‘s ascent to the White House for a second term in office and his broad support for — and involvement in — the crypto industry.
About 22% of Republicans said they have invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin or ether, according to a Pew Research Center poll published June 8. By contrast, 17% of Democrats use crypto. Pew surveyed 8,512 U.S. adults at the end of January.
“[Crypto] has always had a libertarian streak, and its early adopters tended to align with that ethos — skepticism of centralized power and government solutions,” said Colin McLaren, the head of government relations at the Solana Policy Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for the crypto industry.
“That ideological DNA maps more naturally onto the right’s instincts, so it’s not surprising to see Republican ownership tick up as the technology goes mainstream,” McLaren said.
A partisan divide recently emerged in investors’ crypto usage, Pew found.
Prior to 2026, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were just as likely as Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to say they’d held crypto, according to Pew’s data. However, while use among Republicans has increased by six percentage points since 2021, from 16%, it hasn’t budged among Democrats.
“There’s a massive, massive partisan gap,” said Eli Yokley, U.S. politics analyst at Morning Consult, a nonpartisan research group.
That gap started to emerge around mid-2023, and “really took off around the time of the 2024 election,” Yokley said, citing Morning Consult data.
One likely reason for that shift: Trump’s endorsement and adoption of crypto, Yokley said.
There’s a massive, massive partisan gap.
Eli Yokley
Morning Consult analyst
“Even as the crypto sector claimed to be bipartisan, its priorities — deregulation and withdrawn enforcement — always leaned toward corporate-friendly policies that are mostly, though not exclusively, associated with Republicans,” said Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit.
There’s no ‘Obama coin’
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted since his first term in office.
In 2019, Trump wrote on social media that he was “not a fan” of crypto, which he said was “unregulated” and “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
However, within a few years, Trump had forayed into the business of digital assets, swelling his family’s wealth.
In 2022, he launched his first collection of nonfungible tokens, better known as NFTs — a series of $99 digital “trading cards” featuring cartoon drawings of him in various heroic postures and outfits.
He and his family have since debuted other digital offerings, including additional NFTs, the World Liberty Financial crypto venture, and $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins.
The White House has also pushed to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world” during Trump’s second term in office, “including steps to allow crypto firms to become banks,” according to Pew Research Center.
By the second quarter of 2025, the partisan gap of crypto use peaked at about 11 percentage points, according to Morning Consult data. Specifically, 27.9% of Republicans had bought or sold cryptocurrency in the past 12 months, versus 17.3% of Democrats, it found.
The gap has since declined to about five points, at 23.6% to 17.7%, respectively, according to Morning Consult.
It’s hard to “de-couple” the rise of GOP crypto adoption from the Trump family’s embrace of it, Yokley said.
“There’s no Obama coin,” he said. “There are Trump coins and Melania coins.”
‘The gender gap is a much bigger gap than politics’
However, politics isn’t the sole driver, experts said.
Demographics like age and gender are also important factors that, alongside politics, are influencing variations in crypto adoption, they said.
For example, about 74% of crypto traders are men, Yokley said, citing Morning Consult data.
“Women’s more cautious approach to speculative investing explains much of this: Crypto traders carry significantly higher consumer confidence and risk tolerance than the general population, and that skew is overwhelmingly male,” Yokley said.
Young men, especially, are “huge adopters” of crypto relative to other investors — a trend that aligns with others, like sports betting, in which there are similar gaps in uptake, Yokley said.
Men under age 45 have traded crypto at roughly twice the rate of women under age 45 from 2022 to 2026— around 38% to 42% versus 13% to 16%, respectively, according to Morning Consult.
Young investors broadly have turned more readily to speculative investments like meme stocks, leveraged exchange-traded funds, crypto, sports betting platforms and prediction markets, in a trend some experts have called “financial nihilism.”
Young men have also “become a bit more conservative on the ideological spectrum” relative to their peers, Yokley said.
“I think the big takeaway here is the gender gap is a much bigger gap than politics,” he said. “But the gender gap is politics, too.”
