The cryptocurrency market has attracted significant attention from institutional and retail investors, financial media, and policymakers. As of 2024, 17% of U.S. adults say that they have ever invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency.1 Despite investors’ growing interest in cryptocurrencies in recent years—alongside concerns about their volatility, their role as an “implicit” competitor to traditional financial markets, and pressing regulatory warnings2 —academic research on the factors that drive or hamper crypto investing remains limited.

This paragraph will explain whether hype and social preferences drive or hamper crypto investing. In the context of our paper, we define hype as an individual’s susceptibility to narrative contagion, namely the tendency to be influenced by socially transmitted investment stories. Moreover, in line with other finance papers, we define social preferences as a willingness to act in favor of societal goals, even in the absence of direct personal benefit. We focus on these two factors, given that major criticisms of cryptocurrencies have often revolved around hype3 and various social issues.4 First, investigating the impact of hype on crypto investing directly addresses the concerns raised by financial regulators, who warn that investors may be lured into this market by narratives of ever rising crypto-asset prices and get richquick stories potentially threatening the stability of the financial system. Second, studying the impact of social preferences on crypto investing is essential because various social5 concerns from institutions regarding the adoption of certain cryptocurrencies might have hampered individuals’ investments in cryptocurrencies—concerns that are also addressed in academic research. The role of social preferences in discouraging investments in assets like crypto presents a unique setting: if individuals avoid investing in crypto for pro-social concerns, they may implicitly forego particularly high returns

To study the role of hype and social preferences on crypto investing, we utilize both a survey and a pre-registered experiment. This leads us to use two data sets, the LISS panel and Prolific, respectively, due to their well-documented strengths for each of the methods. First, the LISS panel is well suited for our survey because it is a probability-based sample drawn from the Dutch population register, allows us to add a custom survey module and link it to rich pre-existing demographic and behavioral data from other LISS waves, includes validated demographic measures, and offers high response rates. Accordingly, all these features make the LISS panel one of the most representative and comprehensive data sets for conducting surveys, and thus it is widely used in the household finance literature.

Overall, these approaches reflect the strengths of each setting: a well-established representative household panel covering the Netherlands, while Prolific’s U.S. pool enables rigorous experimental designs. Both countries also rank among those with the highest average annual number of Bitcoin transactions, making them relevant contexts for studying crypto investment behavior.