A recent survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional network for tech professionals, found that 50% of professionals trust cryptocurrency and 57% currently own some.
The data was gathered from a survey of 1,800 respondents over the course of the last couple of days. Respondents included employees of Twitter, Amazon, JPMorgan and a variety of other companies.
The survey asked respondents whether they trust cryptocurrency, whether they own any and whether they would accept cryptocurrency as payment as part of their total compensation.
“The most surprising takeaway from this survey is that only half of survey respondents trust cryptocurrency,” said Fiorella Riccobono, who ran the survey and collected the data. “Given companies like Tesla, PayPal, Square, and Twitter have all shown their exposure to bitcoin, I expected their confidence to trickle into the tech industry and their respective employees more.”
Who trusts crypto more?
Interestingly, employees of big banks seemed to trust crypto more than those in tech jobs.
For example, 90% of professionals at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 70% of Goldman Sachs professionals say they trust cryptocurrency. This seemingly is in line with a renewed interest in cryptocurrencies by institutional investors during the currency bull run, including Goldman Sachs re-launching of its crypto trading desk on March 1 after a three-year hiatus. Comparably, only 52% of professionals at Amazon and 50% of Apple professionals trust cryptocurrency.
Read more: Amazon Managed Blockchain at Last Supports Ethereum, Ending a Two-Year Tease
Meanwhile, 39% of respondents said they would accept crypto as part of their total compensation, led by 80% of employees at Credit Karma, the credit monitoring company. Just 38% of employees at PayPal, a company that recently entered the crypto fray, said they would accept compensation in crypto.
While Riccobono was surprisedtrust in crypto wasn’t higher, other respondents employed by companies that have shown familiarity with crypto held bags. For example, 75% of Twitter professionals who responded to the survey own cryptocurrency, and 64% of the Bloomberg respondents said they did.
Read more: Tesla Invests $1.5B in Bitcoin, Plans to Accept Crypto Payments
Users of Blind can also share posts, or ask questions. A Facebook professional on Blind wrote, “Half my wealth in crypto[.] It’s the future of money, and you’ll probably do it too someday. Is it risky? Yes. But I am highly confident it will pay off.”
Meanwhile, an Amazon professional posted that one of his or her concerns is that people who don’t understand blockchains generally don’t mentally separate blockchain utilization (e.g., cryptocurrency) from the underlying technology that makes everything possible (the blockchain itself).
“It’s concerning because if people don’t make that distinction, then the failure of one or more trending cryptos will cause people to mentally write off the benefits or the potential benefits of the underlying technology,” the anonymous professional wrote. “That’s why I’ve been looking at investing in currencies that exist on underlying systems that I think are scalable beyond simple payment ledgers.”
And as one professional at LinkedIn put it:
Just bought around 100K worth of bitcoin. YOLO. Bitcoin to the
.
According to Riccobono, Blind decided to run this survey because it is apparent that decentralized finance is likely to impact significantly how banks operate in the future.
“Users on Blind have begun to recognize the potential to shift the whole financial system at a macroeconomic level,” she said.