Nexo, a digital-asset wealth platform operating in more than 190 jurisdictions, has published a survey of 1,000 affluent investors across the United States, United Kingdom, and Argentina that puts a number on a gap the industry has mostly described anecdotally. Two-thirds of respondents already hold crypto, yet the platform’s new Crypto Integration Index puts the average investor at just 4.83 out of 10, a score Nexo says reflects exposure to the asset class without deeper financial commitment. The findings, laid out in the full report , point to operational friction rather than risk perception as the main barrier standing between ownership and actually building wealth with crypto.
The index, introduced for the first time in this report, scores investors from 1 to 10 across five equally weighted dimensions: how much of a portfolio sits in crypto, how long positions are held, whether crypto features in retirement planning, whether it has replaced a traditional asset, and how its risk is perceived relative to stocks or real estate. Nexo built the measure to separate ownership from commitment, arguing that most existing adoption surveys stop at whether someone holds an asset rather than how central it has become to their financial planning. The survey was fielded in February and March 2026 through the research platform Attest, with respondents screened for a minimum of $100,000 in liquid assets in the US and UK and $40,000 in Argentina, thresholds meant to capture roughly the top quarter to third of each market by investable wealth.
Risk perception is no longer what separates holders
Risk perception, long treated as the default obstacle in most crypto-adoption research, accounts for only 13.6% of the variation in CII scores among respondents, according to the report. Substitution, meaning whether an investor has swapped a traditional holding for crypto rather than simply adding it alongside one, and retirement integration together explain more than half of that variation. “Risk perception used to be the story in every crypto adoption survey. It isn’t anymore,” said Iliya Kalchev, an analyst at Nexo, who added that what actually separates investors is whether they have folded crypto into long-term planning, not how risky they still consider it to be.
The pattern also differs by market in ways the report ties to local conditions rather than crypto itself. In Argentina, adoption looks more like a displacement of cash, which the report links to years of currency depreciation and capital controls. In the United States, crypto instead competes directly with equity allocations, a higher bar that, once cleared, produces the deepest average integration of the three markets: a CII of 5.07 against 62.3% ownership, the lowest ownership rate of the group. The UK shows the widest gap between the two measures, with 65% of respondents holding crypto but an average score of 4.75, reflecting more fragmented, shallower positions.
For the most committed holders, the friction turns operational
The report sorts respondents into five bands, from Pre-entry investors with no crypto exposure through a “Structurally Integrated” group scoring 7 or higher, which Nexo says makes up 4.7% of the sample. Newer entrants cite unfamiliarity with digital assets and volatility as their leading obstacles, concerns the report describes as ones that tend to fade with time and exposure. Among the Structurally Integrated group, the leading frictions shift toward security concerns, cited by 36%, high fees at 34%, and platform complexity at 28%, ahead of tax uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty, and fiat conversion, each cited by 21%. Nexo, which sells crypto-backed loans, yield products, and a crypto debit card, frames these as scaling problems tied to position size rather than entry-level concerns, though the report does not break down which specific fees or platform features respondents had in mind.
That distinction extends beyond Nexo’s own product line. If the pattern holds, it suggests wealth platforms, exchanges with managed products, and advisors serving high-net-worth clients need to offer the same tools built for traditional assets, yield on idle balances, liquidity access without a forced sale, and integration with retirement and tax planning, rather than more education aimed at first-time buyers. “Once an investor gets past the risk perception stage, what’s left is security, fees, and platform user-friendliness,” said Neil Steinhardt, COO of Nexo US.
What the survey does not establish
Nexo discloses a commercial interest in digital-asset adoption in the report itself, and the investor archetypes described are composite profiles rather than individual case studies. A sample of 1,000 respondents split across three countries with wealth-based screening is also narrow enough that findings for any single age bracket or country carry wider margins than the topline figures suggest. It remains unclear whether the frictions identified, security and fees chief among them, are specific to how affluent investors currently access crypto through existing platforms, or would hold up under different custody and product structures the report does not test. The findings also predate any changes Nexo or competitors might make in response to them, so whether that friction narrows going forward is not something this survey can answer on its own.
