Institutional crypto adoption

CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey was conducted towards the end of November, just a few weeks after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.

A new CNBC survey suggests that only 8% of Americans have a favorable view of cryptocurrency as of the end of November, down significantly from the 19% recorded in March.

CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey was conducted between Nov. 26 and Nov. 30. It, however, should be taken with a grain of salt as, despite its name, it had a relatively small sample size of 800 respondents across the U.S. in total, with a margin error of +/- 3.5%.

The survey was published on Dec. 7, and alongside the declining number of crypto friendly respondents, CNBC highlighted that the number of haters (those with negative crypto views) has grown rapidly, increasing from 25% in March to 43% by November.

CNBC suggested the results indicate a “dramatic fall for an investment that was touted as its own asset class and had a celebrated coming-out party on the global stage with multiple Super Bowl ads and celebrity endorsements.”

“That popularity attracted many ordinary Americans to crypto and the survey shows 24% of the public invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency in the past, up from 16% in March.”

The survey also indicated that a fair amount of crypto investors are turning sour on the asset class too, as 42% of such respondents indicated to have a “somewhat or very negative view” of crypto.

“According to the survey, 42% of crypto investors now have a somewhat or very negative view of the asset, in line with the 43% result for all adults in the survey. The main difference: 17% of crypto investors are ‘very negative’ compared with 47% for non-crypto investors,” CNBC notes.

While the survey did not postulate what caused the negative sentiment between March and November, recent events in the crypto industry are likely to have played a part.

In May, Do Kwon’s brainchild U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Terra USD (UST) imploded, wiping $44 billion out of the market. In July crypto lender Celsius — among a handful of others — went bankrupt and locked up an inordinate amount of customer funds.

November saw the biggest shock this year, with FTX, the third-largest crypto exchange by trading volumes filing for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, wiping billions out of the market again and locking up customer funds.

Speaking at the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit this week, Brian Brook, the CEO of crypto exchange Bitfury emphasized that crypto is “90% retail market, which means the sentiment of mom-and-pop investors really matters.”'

"And so when you read FTX stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, literally every day for the last 30 days…what it does is for relative new entrants, they get scared. "

"And so as a result, liquidity is thinner than it would have been and people's willingness to invest is lower," he added. 

Related: Vitalik Buterin on the crypto blues: Focus on the tech, not the price

That being said, it’s not all doom and gloom, at least when it comes to institutional investors.

According to a Coinbase-sponsored survey released on Nov. 22 and conducted between Sep. 21 and Oct. 27, it had found that 62% of institutional investors invested in crypto had increased their allocations over the past 12 months.

This week, Crypto exchange Bitstamp also claimed that institutional registrations within its digital asset trading platform were up 57% in November, despite FTX dominating the headlines all month.