Bitcoin fell roughly 54% from its high last October to its low on the first of July, on CoinGecko and Investing.com data, so any honest read of where digital assets stand right now starts with a loss. Anyone who bought near the top is sitting on real damage, and no amount of industry progress changes that.
That’s also why the research below is worth your time. DAG commissioned a survey of affluent American households through the Affluent Consumer Research Company, and the fieldwork ran in February and March of this year, four to five months after the October peak, while the market was still falling. These aren’t the answers of people watching prices go up.
What the survey found
ACRC surveyed 694 U.S. households with at least $200,000 to invest, 454 of whom currently held digital assets. Weighted to the affluent population, here’s the headline.
38% of affluent U.S. households currently hold digital assets, and 59% are crypto-engaged, meaning they hold now, held before, or are weighing it. Among the households that do hold, the average holding is close to $686,000.
Applied to U.S. Census counts of roughly 26 million affluent households, that 38% works out to about 9.9 million affluent households holding digital assets. I’d treat that as an estimate rather than a measurement, because it’s a survey figure extended across a population, but the arithmetic is simple enough that you can check it yourself.
$686,000 is the number I’d sit with. That isn’t a hobby position, so for a lot of these households it’s a material piece of the balance sheet, and in a lot of practices it’s sitting outside the plan entirely.
Six kinds of affluent crypto owner
Grouping the 454 owners by holdings, intent and planning behavior produces six distinct segments, and they’re nothing like each other.
Crypto Principals hold $1.34M on average, make up 21% of owners, and 79% are highly interested in a specialist firm. Nearly nine in ten have already written digital assets into their estate plans, so the planning conversation has started somewhere, and the only question is whether it started with you.
Wealth Architects hold $935K, make up 25% of owners, and only 36% are highly interested. They’re the biggest single group and the least urgent, because they’re already structurally organized. The opening with them is integration with a plan that exists rather than rescue from a mess.
Tacticians hold $857K, make up 21% of owners, and 81% are highly interested, the highest of any segment. They also trade the most, which is exactly what makes their tax position the most complicated once basis has to be tracked per wallet.
Then the smaller three. Diversifiers hold $239K and 10% of owners, with 20% highly interested. Lone Holders hold $214K and 13% of owners, with 12% highly interested, and 47% of them have left their holdings untouched for seven years or more. Dabblers hold $25K and 9% of owners, with 2% highly interested.
The concentration is the part worth writing down. The top three segments account for 67% of all affluent crypto owners and nearly all of the addressable balance, so the practical targeting question isn’t “who owns crypto,” it’s which of these three you’re actually equipped to serve.
The ownership is young and the money is old
One more split from the same data, and it’s the one that connects digital assets to succession planning.
Among affluent crypto owners, 55% are aged 25 to 44, against 24% of affluent households generally. At the other end, 7% of owners are 65 or over, while that age group makes up 38% of affluent households. That second 38% is a population share and not an ownership rate, so it isn’t the same 38% as the headline above. The people holding this are, on average, a generation younger than the people holding the wealth.
That matters for a practice because it means digital assets show up twice: once as a held-away asset today, and again as the thing the next generation already understands when the transfer happens.
What would actually move them
ACRC also asked the 114 respondents who didn’t own any digital assets yet what would prompt them to invest. The answers weren’t close.
61% said they would if a trusted financial advisor recommended it. 55% said if it became standard in wealth management, 48% pointed to a better regulatory environment and 40% wanted clearer tax guidance. Only 1% said nothing would prompt them, which is another way of saying that 99% named at least one thing that would.
Read that list against what’s actually happened. Regulatory clarity improved a lot in 2025 and 2026, though the market-structure question is still open. Tax guidance arrived, in the demanding form of per-wallet basis tracking. Standardization in wealth management is visibly under way. The one trigger that hasn’t moved is the first one, and it’s the only one on the list an individual advisor controls.
What predicts who actually engages
The survey went one step further and looked at which signals separate the clients who engage a specialist from the ones who don’t. Across 220 clients in the three priority segments, three signals together explain about 40% of the variation.
The strongest single predictor is worry about their digital-asset taxes. Second is willingness to switch advisors. Third is a belief that crypto needs professional structure around it.
I’d underline the first one. The thing most likely to bring a wealthy crypto owner into a conversation isn’t market outlook, it’s a tax problem they can feel and can’t solve on their own. Which brings us to the part of the regulatory picture that a lot of people currently have backwards.
Related from Digital Ascension Group. The full research, including the conversion-window analysis and the segment methodology, sits with DAG’s institutional desk. If you’d like to see how it maps onto your own book, DAG.com/institutional is the place to start.
The tax reporting is live, and a lot of people have this backwards
This is the part I’d flag hardest for advisors, because getting it wrong in front of a client is embarrassing.
Broker reporting is in effect. Under the final regulations at T.D. 10000, brokers report gross proceeds on digital-asset sales from January 1, 2025, so the first Forms 1099-DA reached taxpayers early this year. Cost-basis reporting applies to assets acquired in a custodial broker account from January 1, 2026, which means the first forms carrying basis won’t show up until early 2027.
Congress did repeal a digital-asset broker rule in 2025, but it wasn’t this one. Public Law 119-5 disapproved a separate Treasury rule that had stretched the definition of “broker” to cover decentralized-finance front ends. Form 1099-DA survived it and is in force. If you tell a client that broker reporting went away, they’ll find out you were wrong when the form shows up.
There’s also Revenue Procedure 2024-28, which gives a safe harbor for allocating unused basis to assets held in each wallet or account as of January 1, 2025. That replaced the pooled approach a lot of people had been using, and for someone holding across several venues over several years, reconstructing that allocation is genuine work with a deadline on it. Put that next to the predictor above and you can see why the tax conversation opens doors that a market conversation doesn’t.
Meanwhile, the build didn’t stop
Back to where we started, because the survey timing only means something if you know what the market was doing around it.
Total crypto market value went from close to $3.0 trillion at the end of 2025 to somewhere around $2.6 trillion this August. That’s a real decline, and it understates things, because the peak was in October rather than at year-end.
Now put the infrastructure numbers next to it. Stablecoin supply went from about $310 billion to about $300 billion, so the dollar-denominated tokens sitting on the same rails barely moved while the assets themselves were cut in half. Tokenized real-world assets went the other direction, from $35.66 billion at the end of October to roughly $38 billion in August. That’s real growth on a very small base, roughly one three-hundredth the size of investment gold, and both halves of that belong in the same sentence. And Citigroup launched digital-asset custody on August 18, a decision that got made and funded while prices were falling.
The rules moved in the same window. The SEC’s accounting staff pulled SAB 121 in January 2025, which had made bank custody expensive enough to be impractical, and the OCC followed in March with Interpretive Letter 1183. The FDIC and the Federal Reserve dropped their own notification requirements over the next few weeks. That one removed the requirement that a national bank get supervisory sign-off before it starts custodying crypto or holding stablecoin reserves. A permission you have to ask for and a permission you already have are pretty different permissions.
The legislative record is split, though. The GENIUS Act set up a federal framework for payment stablecoins and was signed in July 2025, but its primary effective date is January 2027 unless regulators finish their implementing rules sooner. The market-structure bill that would settle which regulator supervises what, the CLARITY Act, passed the House in July 2025 and still hasn’t passed the Senate. So anyone describing digital assets as a settled regulatory category is describing something the statute book doesn’t support.
I want to be careful here, because the honest version is weaker than the exciting version. The building continued, but it didn’t accelerate. Some measures grew, some held roughly flat, and very few tracked the price down. That distinction is the finding, so I’d rather state it plainly than oversell it.
The gap between being asked and being able to answer
Back in 2022, Cerulli found that 80% of advisors were getting asked about crypto by clients while 14% were actually using or recommending it. By 2025 the Bitwise and VettaFi benchmark survey put client questions at 94% and the share of advisors able to buy digital assets directly in client accounts at 42%, up from 19% in 2023.
The gap narrowed, but it’s still wide. And set against the survey’s numbers it gets sharper: 38% of affluent households hold this, 61% of the ones who don’t would move on an advisor’s recommendation, and fewer than half of advisors can act.
I’d add one caution on the advisor data, because it cuts against the argument I’ve been making. Those 2025 figures come from a survey published in January 2026 covering calendar 2025, and the drawdown started in October. So the series shows where advisors stood going into the decline, not how they behaved through it. Advisor allocation already fell once before, from 16% in 2021 down to 11% in 2023, so it’s cyclical rather than a straight line.
What this asks of a practice
None of this requires having a view on price. A practice can be completely prepared for digital assets and still decide not to allocate, so these are operational questions more than investment ones.
The first is having a house position at all. “We don’t recommend digital assets” is a perfectly defensible answer, and clients can tell within about two minutes whether you’ve thought about it or you haven’t. Writing the position down, with the reasoning, turns an awkward question into a routine one.
The second is finding out what clients already hold. Assets held away don’t show up in performance reporting and don’t inform the plan, so with average holdings close to $686,000, an unasked question can leave a meaningful chunk of a household’s balance sheet outside the plan.
The third is the tax and reporting workflow, ahead of the client asking, because that’s the strongest predictor in the data of whether someone engages a specialist at all.
And the fourth is custody, including what it doesn’t cover. Digital assets held in custody aren’t guaranteed and aren’t protected by the FDIC or SIPC, and custodial insurance applies only within the terms and limits of the custodian’s own policy. Digital assets are also highly volatile and an investor can lose the entire amount, which the last ten months made concrete. Those are real limits and they belong in the conversation before a client needs them, rather than after.
Where I could be wrong
The argument here is that infrastructure has come loose from price. That’s testable, so here’s what would show it’s wrong.
If one of the banks that just entered digital-asset custody exits the business, the entry decisions were cyclical after all. If the stablecoin rules get narrowed at the rulemaking stage or the effective date slides well past January 2027, the legislative half of this weakens. If tokenized asset balances fall over a sustained stretch rather than a quarter, the clearest single piece of evidence goes away. If advisor allocation reverses in the next benchmark survey the way it did between 2021 and 2023, then advisor behavior still tracks price whatever the plumbing is doing. And if a regulated custodian fails with client losses, the custody argument needs rebuilding from scratch.
If none of that happens over the next few years, the read here is probably right. If several happen, it isn’t. That’s the standard I’d want applied to anyone making this case, including me.
Take the time to get the operational answers in place before the next client conversation, because the questions are already arriving and the four decisions above don’t depend on knowing where prices go next.
Methodology, and citing this research
The proprietary figures in this article come from a survey conducted by the Affluent Consumer Research Company on behalf of DAG, fielded February to March 2026. The sample was 694 U.S. households with at least $200,000 to invest, of whom 454 currently held digital assets. The trigger question in “What would actually move them” has a base of 114 respondents who did not yet own digital assets. The predictor analysis has a base of 220 clients in the three priority segments. Population figures are extrapolated against U.S. Census counts of roughly 26 million affluent households and are estimates rather than measurements. Full methodology, including the weighting method, is available on request.
ACRC is a quantitative research firm specializing in U.S. households in the top 10% by wealth, and it adheres to Insights Association Ethical Standards.
If you’d like to cite these figures, please attribute them as: Affluent Consumer Research Company for DAG, *The Affluent Crypto Investor*, 2026, and link back to this article so readers can see the base sizes and caveats attached to each number.
Sources
- Affluent Consumer Research Company for DAG, *The Affluent Crypto Investor*, fielded February to March 2026. Base: 694 U.S. households with at least $200,000 to invest, 454 of them current holders; trigger question base 114; predictor analysis base 220. Cited for: ownership and engagement rates, average holdings, the six owner segments, the age split, the trigger ranking and the predictor analysis.
- CoinGecko bitcoin price history and global market capitalization charts, read August 23, 2026.
- Investing.com, bitcoin historical data.
- DefiLlama, stablecoin supply and issuer shares.
- RWA.xyz, tokenized real-world-asset totals, excluding stablecoins.
- Citigroup, Custody+ press release, August 18, 2026.
- OCC Interpretive Letter 1183, March 7, 2025.
- SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 122, 90 Federal Register 8492, January 30, 2025; FDIC FIL-7-2025, March 28, 2025; Federal Reserve rescission of SR 22-6 and SR 23-8, April 24, 2025.
- Public Law 119-27, the GENIUS Act (enacted as S. 1582), with the effective-date provision as stated in the FDIC proposed rulemaking at 91 Federal Register 18534.
- H.R. 3633, the CLARITY Act, 119th Congress, bill status read August 23, 2026.
- T.D. 10000, 89 Federal Register 56480.
- Internal Revenue Service, Revenue Procedure 2024-28.
- Public Law 119-5 (H.J. Res. 25), signed April 10, 2025.
- Bitwise/VettaFi Benchmark Survey of Financial Advisor Attitudes Toward Crypto Assets, eighth annual edition, 299 advisors, January 2026.
- Cerulli Associates, “Cryptocurrency: Navigating a Frontier Asset Class for Advisors and Asset Managers,” 2022. The report itself is gated; the linked page is Cerulli’s own description of it.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment, legal or tax advice. It doesn’t constitute an offer to buy or sell any security and shouldn’t be relied on as a recommendation for any investment strategy.
Digital assets are highly volatile and carry regulatory, custody and liquidity risks that can result in partial or total loss of principal. Past performance does not indicate future results.
Survey data referenced here was commissioned by DAG.
Third-party data is attributed to its publishers and inclusion does not imply endorsement. Statistics describe industry-wide or public-record experience and are not the results of any DAG client, product or recommendation.
For the bigger picture, see the guide to asset tokenization.
Part of our guide: Crypto Research.
