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One in 10 eurozone households own cryptoassets, says ECB


Frankfurt: Almost one in 10 European households has invested in cryptoassets, an European Central Bank (ECB) examine revealed Tuesday mentioned, highlighting excessive demand for the dangerous investments.

“As many as 10%” of survey respondents in six giant eurozone countries, together with Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands, mentioned they owned cryptoassets.

The proportion of crypto house owners different between the nations, with the determine as little as 6% in France and above 14% within the Netherlands.

Monetary oversight our bodies have been growing their scrutiny of the crypto market because the asset class has grown, whereas latest volatility has highlighted the dangers concerned for buyers.

Rate of interest hikes in the USA and the Russian invasion of Ukraine offered the backdrop for steep drops within the worth of bitcoin and different crypto property.

Cryptocurrency “is value nothing”, European Central Financial institution president Christine Lagarde mentioned within the Netherlands on Sunday.

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“It is based mostly on nothing. There isn’t any underlying asset to behave as an anchor of security,” she mentioned, counselling potential buyers to not observe “hype”.

The vast majority of holdings had been value “lower than 5,000 euros” ($5,358), the report mentioned, with the tendency in the direction of smaller stashes.

Excessive- and low-income households had been comparatively extra more likely to maintain crypto than middle-income households.

“On common, younger grownup males and extremely educated respondents had been extra more likely to make investments,” the report mentioned.

An growing variety of institutional buyers had been additionally concerned within the dangerous asset class, with 56 % of these surveyed saying that they had some publicity, up from 45% in 2020.

The whole measurement of the crypto market reached a excessive of over 2.5 trillion euros “in late 2021” and was nonetheless “seven instances larger than it was at first of 2020” regardless of latest drops, the report mentioned.

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