Fidelity Digital released a survey report recently displaying substantial growth in a number of categories surrounding digital assets. Across Europe and the U.S., year-over-year growth existed in almost every category, which includes current exposure and perception and appeal.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the survey and some of it’s takeaways.

Crypto Catalysts: Fidelity’s Findings

The 40-slide report outlines survey insights from over 1,000 respondents in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. between December 2020 and April 2021. Respondents included financial advisors, high-net-worth investors, hedge funds, family offices, endowments and foundations, and the like. Roughly half of the surveyed investors already had an investment in digital assets, with Asia and Europe showing higher rates of investment than the U.S.

70% of all surveyed investors had a neutral-to-positive perception of digital assets, and nine out of ten respondents said that they found digital assets to be appealing. Furthermore, roughly eight out of ten surveyed investors felt that digital assets have a place in a portfolio.

What assets are investors targeting? Surprisingly, only 21% of surveyed U.S. investors own bitcoin, compared to 46% of surveyed investors in Europe and 45% of surveyed investors in Asia, respectively. Surveyed U.S. respondents also showed lower indexed crypto holdings of other major tokens as well, including ethereum, litecoin and XRP. Nonetheless, adoption continues to increase basically across the board year-over-year, with U.S. family offices and financial advisors seeing the largest upticks in adoption.

Bitcoin’s strength is typically seen as the anchor for crypto’s broader growth and is quickly becoming the pillar of formal investment options as crypto ETFs come to life. | Source: BTC:USD on TradingView.com

Related Reading | Forget Walmart, Here’s The Real Reason Why Bitcoin Crashed

What’s Holding Respondents Back?

The biggest points of crypto skepticism from Fidelity’s survey participants seemed to lie in crypto’s inherent volatility and mysticism. Over half of the surveyed investors cited price volatility as “one of the greatest barriers to investment.” And nearly half of the survey respondents said that a lack of fundamentals to gauge appropriate value was a barrier to entry as well.

Furthermore, while questioning around the topic was limited, tokenization showed weaker enthusiasm relative to Fidelity’s previous survey. Only around a quarter of U.S. and European investors surveyed believed that real estate has great potential for tokenization, which was a twelve percent decrease from the last survey.

Despite these reservations, the survey shows substantial optimism through-and-through. Over double the respondents in the U.S. said that they bought or invested in digital assets through an investment product compared to the prior year. As more formalized investment products come to market, it’s reasonable to expect this number to continue to grow.

The reports comes just a few short weeks after Fidelity Digital’s ambitious future price target for BTC. Just a couple months ago, Fidelity Digital bolstered it’s workforce by 70% due to an increase in demand.

Related Reading | Ukraine Adopts New Law To Legalize Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencies

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