Who Do Crypto Users Actually Trust?

Who Do Crypto Users Actually Trust? Wharton’s Latest Research Has a Clear Answer — and It Changes How We Think About Protection

What does consumer trust in cryptocurrency actually look like in 2025?

According to the Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Report 2025 published by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, consumers are far more discerning about crypto guidance than the industry gives them credit for — and who they trust most reveals something important about what the market actually needs.

The Trust Hierarchy Is Not What You’d Expect

The Wharton c3i (Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index), now in its third year of longitudinal data collection across approximately 42,000 U.S. respondents, asked participants a direct question: who do you trust when it comes to cryptocurrency guidance?

The results were clear. Researchers and academics ranked highest (4.83 out of 7), followed by finance industry leaders (4.51) and friends (4.15). Tech industry leaders and personal bankers also scored above the midpoint.

At the bottom: celebrities, politicians, and professional sports figures — all scoring below 2.50.

This matters. The crypto industry has spent years courting influencer partnerships, celebrity endorsements, and political adjacency as growth strategies. The data says consumers aren’t buying it — not in terms of trust, anyway.

What consumers actually want guidance from are people with credentials, track records, and real-world expertise in finance and technology. They want the equivalent of what traditional finance has always offered: professional, accountable authority.

The Paradox That Every Crypto Company Should Think About

Here’s where the Wharton findings get genuinely interesting.

While politicians rank among the least trusted sources of crypto guidance, the same consumers who dismiss politicians as advisors believe the U.S. president has significant influence over crypto prices. Crypto owners consistently rated presidential influence higher than non-owners — and this pattern held steady across 14 months of data.

In plain terms: consumers know crypto markets are shaped by centralized power, even as the technology is built on decentralized principles.

This is not a contradiction to dismiss. It’s a signal.

If you hold crypto and you understand that prices can be moved by a tweet, an executive order, or a regulatory signal — you are holding an asset with a structural vulnerability. Decentralization at the protocol level doesn’t immunize you from centralized market forces. And right now, less than 2% of all crypto assets are insured against the consequences of that vulnerability.

What This Means for Crypto Deposit Insurance

Blockchain Deposit Insurance Corporation (BDIC) was built around exactly this gap. The question isn’t whether crypto markets are volatile or whether political forces can move prices — they clearly can. The question is: what happens to the individual holder when things go wrong?

In traditional finance, FDIC insurance — established in 1933 — answered that question for bank depositors. You don’t need to trust the bank implicitly. You don’t need to predict what the Federal Reserve will do. Your deposits are protected up to the coverage limit, and that protection doesn’t depend on market conditions.

BDIC provides the same structural protection for crypto. Standard coverage protects $0–$10,000 in digital assets. Preferred coverage extends that to $10,000–$20,000. Claims are processed via smart contracts, removing reliance on manual processes or institutional discretion.

In 2025, $17 billion was stolen in crypto scams and fraud, according to the Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report. That figure isn’t a market anomaly. It’s the ongoing cost of a $3.3 trillion asset class that has no meaningful protection infrastructure for the people who actually use it.

The Credibility Gap — and How to Close It

The Wharton report also found something that speaks directly to how BDIC approaches its own positioning: trust in central regulatory institutions like the SEC and the Federal Reserve is not uniformly low among crypto holders. In fact, at several points in the data series, crypto owners actually showed higher trust in the SEC and Federal Reserve than non-owners — a pattern the researchers suggest may reflect growing comfort with regulatory engagement as the industry matures.

This is the direction the market is moving. Crypto users — especially those who have been in the space long enough to weather volatility and security failures — are not anti-institution. They are pro-accountability. They want the protections that serious financial infrastructure provides, applied to the assets they’ve chosen to hold.

That’s what deposit insurance is. Not a bet against decentralization. Not a concession to TradFi. A structural safety layer that exists because $562 million crypto users deserve the same baseline protection that bank depositors have had for nearly a century.

Why Researchers and Finance Experts Are the Right Messengers

One more finding from the Wharton report is worth naming directly: informal peer networks — friends and family — ranked nearly as high as professional financial experts in terms of trust. At 4.15 out of 7, friends scored above tech industry leaders and personal bankers.

This tells us something about how crypto knowledge actually spreads. It travels person to person, through networks of shared experience, not through top-down broadcasting. Education that is clear, specific, and free of hype travels further in these networks than campaigns built around celebrity or spectacle.

BDIC Bulletin exists for exactly this reason. Every edition is written to be the kind of explanation you could share with someone in your network who holds crypto and wants to understand what protection looks like — without the noise.

The Bottom Line

Wharton’s 2025 consumer confidence research confirms what the market structure already shows: crypto users want expert guidance, not celebrity noise. They understand that centralized forces shape decentralized markets. And they are increasingly open to the kind of credible, accountable infrastructure that makes holding crypto a serious, protected financial decision — not a gamble.

Deposit insurance is that infrastructure.

BDIC provides dual-tier crypto deposit insurance — $0–$10,000 (Standard) and $10,000–$20,000 (Preferred) — with claims settled via smart contracts. Learn more at bdicinsurance.com.

Source: Fritze, M. P., Lamberton, C., Reibstein, D., & Zhang, J. (2026). Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Report 2025: Crypto Volatility. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

$17B figure: Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report.

Non-Investment Disclaimer: BDIC does not market BDIC Coin as an investment or financial instrument. BDIC does not promise or guarantee token price appreciation, dividends, or profit distributions. Purchasers should not expect returns from appreciation of BDIC Coin and should consider the token only for its described utility.

Who Do Crypto Users Actually Trust? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.