While the new year may bring with it prospects of growth and new beginnings, that hasn’t been the case with most of the largest cryptocurrencies, which have largely plummeted in value over the last few days. 

Not to be deterred, cryptocurrency adjacent instruments, such as NFTs, have seen increased interest, with stock prices rising for GameStop over its reported creation of an NFT marketplace. 

In any case, while the cryptocurrency marketplace will always be intrinsically highly volatile, the ringing in of the new year has shown more than double the amount of investment into it than this time last year. 

Across the Gen Pop, those who have invested in crypto have increased from 9% in January 2021, to 19% now, while those who intend to invest have also nearly doubled, moving from 8% to 15%. Perhaps new investors have begun to buy into the idea that crypto could be a good investment tool, or maybe even an avenue to quitting their day jobs. 

While previous CivicScience data has shown that crypto isn’t necessarily for just the young, the last three months have largely been driven by investors 34 and under. 

The income level of investors over the last three months, however, is practically even across the board, indicating crypto is moving past the perception that it only belongs to the wealthy or high-tech accessible. 

And we already know that people are trading their stock assets for crypto (with some by significant portions), but does that mean the crypto market is saturated enough that investors have begun to gift assets for the holidays?

The short answer is yes, but only in small amounts…so far. 

Those who are gifting cryptocurrency to friends or family, unsurprisingly, are the youngest demographic. 

Interestingly however, crypto-givers tend to follow trends in tech very closely but have very little to no interest in following markets and the economy. This gap between tech and finance has always been apparent in cryptocurrency spaces, but is further illustrated here. 

If we look at the people receiving cryptocurrency as a gift over the holidays we see that again, the young are most likely to be on the receiving end as well. So perhaps there is an entire sub-economy of Gen Zers and young Millenials exchanging Bitcoin as gifts to each other. 

As compared to those who gave crypto, those who received it also demonstrate a gap between the tech conscious and financially conscious, though a much smaller one. 

So while the giving of cryptocurrency lags behind the overall trend adoption in the general population, it also demonstrates the potential for growth over the coming year. Despite continued raised eyebrows from some in the financial community, crypto has only grown more and more mainstream. The giving of it, as with stocks and other financial assets, has the potential to grow in time.