Cleveland Fed Study: Telling People About Bitcoin's Gains Makes Them Buy More

4 min readPublished 24 Aug 2026

A Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland working paper has produced experimental evidence for something crypto traders have long assumed but rarely seen tested with a controlled study: simply telling people how much Bitcoin has already gone up makes them more likely to buy it. The paper, titled “Do You Even Crypto, Bro? Cryptocurrencies in Household Finance,” surveyed US households and ran a randomized information experiment, according to Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing, which both published write-ups of the research on August 23, 2026.

The findings matter because they offer institutional-grade support for a feedback-loop theory of crypto rallies: rising prices draw in buyers who saw the prior gains, and their buying can push prices higher still, potentially drawing in more buyers. Cointelegraph reported that the paper’s authors describe this dynamic directly, writing that

“Positive returns attract new participants, which raises the price further.”

What the experiment found

According to Cointelegraph, researchers Michael Weber, Bernardo Candia, Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko surveyed as many as 25,000 US households per wave and then randomly assigned some participants to receive information about Bitcoin, stocks, GameStop or inflation in 2025. Participants shown Bitcoin’s prior 12-month return raised their desired crypto portfolio allocation by roughly 2 percentage points, Cointelegraph reported — about a 47% increase relative to the 4.3% desired allocation reported by the control group. Actual subsequent crypto purchases rose by about 2.5 percentage points, per Cointelegraph, which also reported that the effect was concentrated among people who said a lack of information was the reason they didn’t already own crypto; those who believed crypto was simply a bad investment did not respond to the treatment.

Crypto Briefing covered the same experiment but without citing any of the specific percentage figures. It described the result only as participants who saw Bitcoin’s track record significantly increasing their desired allocation, with those intentions translating into actual purchases.

Beliefs over demographics

Cointelegraph reported that expected returns proved unusually powerful in explaining who owns crypto: for every extra percentage point someone expected to earn on crypto, their odds of actually owning it rose by 0.8 percentage points, according to the paper as relayed by Cointelegraph. Crypto owners expected an average 22% return over the following year, Cointelegraph reported, compared with 7% among non-owners. In a 2021 survey cited by Cointelegraph, 87% of non-owners and 54% of owners said they didn’t know what return to expect from crypto over the following year.

Demographics still mattered at the margins. Cointelegraph reported that people under 40 were 13 percentage points more likely to own crypto than those over 60, and men were about 4 percentage points more likely than women to hold it. Crypto Briefing likewise reported that holders skew younger and male, and said holders are also more libertarian in political orientation — a characterization that does not appear anywhere in Cointelegraph’s detailed account of the paper’s findings.

Bitcoin gains and washing machines

Both outlets reported that the paper links Bitcoin price swings to real-world spending. Cointelegraph gave the specific figure: households whose entire financial portfolio sat in crypto became 1.4 percentage points likelier to buy a durable good when Bitcoin’s price doubled, roughly a 7% rise over the baseline purchase probability, though the effect did not carry over into ordinary spending. Crypto Briefing described the same mechanism in general terms, saying Bitcoin gains correlate with more spending on durable goods like appliances, cars and furniture, and pullbacks when Bitcoin falls, without citing the underlying percentages.

Where the two accounts agree — and where they don’t

Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing agree on the paper’s core architecture: a large household survey plus a randomized experiment showing that Bitcoin return information increases both desired allocation and actual purchases, and a linked finding on durable-goods spending. They diverge sharply on specificity. Cointelegraph cites hard numbers throughout — the 22% versus 7% return-expectation gap, the 0.8-percentage-point ownership effect, the 47% relative jump in desired allocation, the 13-percentage-point age gap. Crypto Briefing offers none of these figures, describing the same results only in qualitative terms.

Crypto Briefing also adds three claims absent from Cointelegraph’s account: that the paper was released as a working paper on July 14, 2026; that crypto holders skew more libertarian in political orientation; and that the paper builds on a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research study of household expectations around digital assets. None of those three details appear in Cointelegraph’s write-up, so they should be treated as single-sourced to Crypto Briefing rather than confirmed facts. CoinDesk published a piece under the identical headline on August 24, 2026, but its content was not available for comparison here.

What remains unresolved

Whether the political-orientation finding Crypto Briefing describes is actually in the underlying paper is unclear, since Cointelegraph’s otherwise detailed rundown of demographic results never mentions it. Neither outlet’s coverage specifies a full methodology beyond the household-survey sample size Cointelegraph cites, and it is not established from these two accounts whether CoinDesk’s separate write-up adds further figures or context.