42% of Americans Want Crypto-Friendly Banks [2026]

Nearly half of American adults say they would bank differently if their financial institution let them hold or trade cryptocurrency, according to a new survey released October 19, 2026. The research, commissioned by the National Cryptocurrency Association (NCA) and fielded by The Harris Poll, found that 42% of U.S. adults would be more likely to use a bank that offers crypto services, exposing a gap between what consumers want and what most banks are willing to discuss.

The findings landed the same week crypto custody and security keep making headlines elsewhere, from the $86 million Ledger hack that rattled wallet holders to fresh scrutiny of hardware wallet supply chains after reports of a hardware implant tied to stolen funds in Europe. Against that backdrop, the NCA poll suggests a sizable share of the public still wants crypto access to come through an institution they already trust: their bank.

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Survey finds 42% of Americans want their bank to offer crypto services

The Harris Poll surveyed 2,017 U.S. adults online between September 15 and 16, 2026, on behalf of the NCA, according to Crypto Economy, which first reported the detailed results. The headline figure, 42% of respondents saying they would be more likely to use a bank offering cryptocurrency services, lines up with a pattern researchers have tracked for several years: interest in digital assets has broadened well past early adopters and into the mainstream banking population.

Two related numbers sharpen that picture. Crypto Economy reported that 35% of respondents said they would be more inclined to actually open an account at a bank that supported crypto, and 36% said they would move a larger share of their overall financial relationship, checking, savings, loans, and investments, to a bank that offered those services. Those are three different thresholds of commitment, from passive preference to account-opening to wallet-share, and all three land in a tight band between the mid-30s and low-40s percent.

That consistency matters for how banks should read the data. A single headline number can be dismissed as survey noise. Three correlated numbers clustered together, drawn from the same 2,017-person sample, read more like a durable segment of the banking public that has made up its mind about wanting crypto access, and is waiting on its bank to catch up.

The 64% problem: banks are not talking about crypto

The more striking finding in the NCA release is not the interest number, it is the silence around it. Crypto Economy’s report on the Harris Poll data found that 64% of consumers said their bank, credit union, or financial advisor had never discussed cryptocurrency with them at all. Applied to the adult U.S. population, that share works out to roughly 168 million Americans who have never heard a word about digital assets from the institution managing their money.

A separate 43% of respondents said they simply did not know whether their own bank offered any crypto-related services, a distinct and arguably more worrying number than the 64% who said the topic never came up. Not knowing whether a service exists is a product-awareness failure on the bank’s part, not a question of consumer indifference.

Put the two figures together and the picture is one of a financial industry that has not yet built the advisory muscle to match consumer curiosity. Banks spent much of the past two years building custody partnerships, trading rails, and compliance programs for digital assets. The Harris Poll numbers suggest that build-out has not yet reached the teller line, the call center script, or the advisor’s client conversation.

What happens when banks do bring up crypto

The survey also looked at the smaller group of consumers whose bank, credit union, or advisor had actually raised the subject of cryptocurrency, and the responses there complicate any simple “banks are ignoring crypto” narrative. Among that group, 52% said they received suggestions to consider crypto, 12% said they were advised against it, 23% described the conversation as neutral, with no real recommendation either way, and 13% said they could not remember the specifics of what was said.

That split suggests advisors who do engage with crypto are more often encouraging than discouraging, by roughly a four-to-one margin over those actively advising against it. But the 23% neutral figure and 13% who do not remember also point to a lot of conversations that amount to acknowledgment without real guidance, a box checked rather than advice given.

Survey metric	Share of respondents	What it measures
More likely to use a bank offering crypto services	42%	General preference for crypto-capable banking
More inclined to open an account at such a bank	35%	Willingness to switch or add an account
Would shift a larger share of financial needs to that bank	36%	Wallet-share migration intent
Bank, credit union or advisor never discussed crypto	64% (about 168 million adults)	Advisory silence on digital assets
Did not know if their bank offers crypto services	43%	Product awareness gap

Why the gap between interest and action exists

Banks have had plenty of reasons to move carefully. Custody of digital assets carries different security requirements than custody of cash or securities, and the past year of wallet breaches has not made the case for speed any easier. The Ledger hardware implant story and the separate $86 million Ledger hack this year are reminders, to any bank compliance officer watching the space, that crypto custody failures are public, expensive, and reputationally costly in a way that a routine wire-transfer error is not.

Tax complexity adds another layer. Jurisdictions outside the U.S. have been tightening crypto reporting rules, as seen in Germany’s new FIFO accounting requirement for crypto wallets, and any bank that offers crypto services to retail customers has to be ready to support the tax documentation that comes with it. That is a real operational lift for an industry where the core ledger systems were not built with blockchain-native assets in mind.

There is also a plain cultural lag. Front-line staff and financial advisors are trained, licensed, and compensated around products that have existed for decades. Crypto is still a newer line item on the compliance checklist, and the Harris Poll numbers suggest that training has not caught up to consumer demand, even at institutions that technically offer some form of digital-asset access.

The regulatory backdrop behind bank crypto caution

Part of the hesitation traces back to regulators who have themselves moved at different speeds. OneBullEx, covering the same NCA research, noted that U.S. banking regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, have not issued uniform guidance on custody, stablecoin handling, and trading permissions for banks, leaving individual institutions to interpret their own risk tolerance. That patchwork makes it harder for any single bank to roll out a crypto advisory program with confidence that the rules will not shift under it.

Coin Edition’s coverage of the same survey results framed the core tension plainly: strong consumer appetite for bank-based crypto access running into financial advice that, for most people, simply is not happening yet. That framing, repeated across multiple outlets covering the NCA release this week, captures why this survey is getting attention beyond the usual crypto press: it is as much a story about financial-advice infrastructure as it is about digital assets.

Wirehouses are already moving, cautiously

Some of the largest wealth-management arms in the country are not waiting for uniform federal guidance to start inching forward. InvestmentNews reported that Merrill, the wealth-management arm of Bank of America, has shifted its posture on crypto exposure for clients. Previously, qualified Merrill clients could buy crypto exchange-traded funds that the firm had already approved. What changed, according to the report, is that Merrill’s financial advisors can now actively recommend those products to clients, rather than simply processing a client-initiated purchase.

That is a meaningful distinction. A firm that allows clients to buy an approved product on request is offering access. A firm whose advisors can recommend that product is offering guidance, the exact piece the Harris Poll data shows is missing for most of the banking public. If more wirehouses follow Merrill’s path, the 64% figure could shrink over the next few survey cycles, though the NCA data offers no projection on how fast that might happen.

Historical context: a second survey tells a related story

The NCA’s crypto-banking survey is not the first research this year to probe how consumers want financial services regulated. Financial Regulation News reported on an earlier 2026 survey from the American Bankers Association, conducted with Morning Consult among more than 4,456 adults, which found that consumers want fintech companies that offer bank-like services held to the same rules as traditional banks. That survey was not about crypto specifically, and it predates the NCA’s September fieldwork by roughly six months, but it points to a consistent public expectation: whoever holds a consumer’s money, bank or fintech, should be accountable to comparable standards.

Read together, the two surveys suggest consumers are not asking banks to abandon caution. They are asking for clarity: tell us what services exist, hold crypto to the same accountability standards as everything else in the account, and have an actual conversation about it when asked.

How crypto-friendly banking compares across the industry

No two categories of financial institution are approaching crypto access the same way right now. Traditional retail banks have generally been the slowest movers, often limiting themselves to back-end custody partnerships rather than customer-facing products. Wirehouses and wealth managers, as the Merrill example shows, are furthest along on the advisory side for clients who already meet certain account thresholds. Crypto-native exchanges remain the default venue for most retail trading activity, but they sit outside the traditional deposit-insurance and advisory framework that the NCA survey respondents seem to want. Credit unions, smaller and often more nimble on member-facing products, have been experimenting in pockets but lack the scale to build the compliance infrastructure that larger banks can afford.

Institution type	Current crypto posture	Main constraint
Large retail banks	Limited custody partnerships, little customer-facing advice	Regulatory ambiguity, legacy core systems
Wirehouses and wealth managers	Advisor-recommended crypto ETFs for qualified clients	Account minimums, suitability rules
Crypto-native exchanges	Full trading access, no deposit insurance	Sits outside traditional banking trust framework
Credit unions	Early, small-scale pilots	Limited compliance budget and scale

Market impact: what this means for banks, fintechs and crypto firms

For traditional banks, the NCA numbers are a competitive warning as much as a market opportunity. A 42% preference share is large enough that any bank willing to build real crypto advisory capability, not just custody plumbing, has room to pull deposits and new accounts from slower-moving rivals. The 36% of respondents open to consolidating more of their financial relationship at a crypto-friendly bank is the number that should worry incumbents most, since it implies existing relationships are genuinely up for grabs, not just new account growth.

For crypto-native firms, the survey cuts the other way. If banks close the advisory gap, some of the retail trading volume that currently flows to exchanges by default, simply because banks offer no alternative, could migrate toward bank-wrapped products instead. That is a longer-term structural risk for exchanges that has shown up elsewhere this year in market-share data, including falling exchange trading volumes even as specific tokens gain relative share, a sign that crypto trading activity itself is in flux independent of any single asset’s price. Token-level sentiment has been just as uneven, as seen in XRP’s muted price action even as Ripple signs hundreds of bank partnerships, a reminder that bank interest in crypto rails does not always translate into retail trading enthusiasm.

Fintechs sit in between. Firms that already blend banking and crypto features have a head start on the advisory layer banks are missing, but the Financial Regulation News survey on fintech oversight suggests consumers want those firms held to bank-grade standards, which could narrow the regulatory arbitrage that let many fintechs move faster than banks in the first place. Broader market jitters do not help the case for caution either, with tech stocks already wobbling on oil prices and geopolitical risk this year, conditions that tend to make risk committees at large banks even more conservative about adding a new asset class to their retail product shelf.

What this means for the 168 million Americans left without guidance

For the individual consumer, the practical takeaway from the NCA data is less about market strategy and more about self-directed research. With 43% of respondents unsure whether their own bank even offers crypto services, and 64% never having had the conversation at all, a large share of the public is currently making crypto decisions, or avoiding them, without institutional input. That raises the stakes on self-custody security practices and on understanding tax obligations independently, both areas where mistakes are costly and hard to reverse once made.

It also means the burden of basic financial literacy around digital assets is, for now, falling more on consumers and on independent coverage than on the institutions consumers already trust with their money. The wider swings in crypto markets this year, from exchange volume shifts to high-profile custody breaches, make that gap more consequential, not less, for the roughly 168 million adults currently navigating it without a banker’s input.

Predictions: where bank crypto services head next

• More wirehouses will follow Merrill’s shift from client-initiated crypto ETF purchases to advisor-recommended products over the next several quarters, narrowing the advice gap at the high end of the wealth-management market first.
• Expect the next NCA or comparable survey cycle to track whether the 64% “never discussed” figure moves, since that number is the clearest benchmark for whether banks are actually building advisory capability rather than just custody infrastructure.
• Regulatory clarity from the OCC and Federal Reserve, if it arrives, will likely unlock faster movement from large retail banks that have so far stayed on the sidelines pending clearer rules on custody and stablecoin handling.
• Credit unions and smaller banks will likely continue to lag on crypto advisory services simply on cost grounds, widening the gap between what large institutions and community-level institutions can offer.
• Consumer tax-reporting tools built for crypto, similar in spirit to the FIFO-based tracking rules now required in Germany, are likely to become a standard part of any bank crypto offering in the U.S. as adoption grows.

Frequently asked questions

Who conducted the crypto-friendly banks survey?
The survey was commissioned by the National Cryptocurrency Association and carried out by The Harris Poll, which surveyed 2,017 U.S. adults online on September 15 and 16, 2026.

What percentage of Americans want their bank to offer crypto services?
42% of respondents said they would be more likely to use a bank that offers cryptocurrency services, according to the NCA’s Harris Poll research.

How many Americans say their bank never discussed crypto with them?
64% of respondents, representing roughly 168 million U.S. adults, said their bank, credit union, or financial advisor had never brought up cryptocurrency.

What happens when banks or advisors do discuss crypto with clients?
Among respondents whose bank or advisor did raise the topic, 52% received suggestions to consider crypto, 12% were advised against it, 23% described the conversation as neutral, and 13% did not remember the details.

Are any major banks already offering crypto advice?
Merrill, Bank of America’s wealth-management arm, has reportedly moved from letting qualified clients buy pre-approved crypto ETFs on request to letting its advisors actively recommend those products, according to InvestmentNews.

Why are banks slow to offer crypto services despite consumer demand?
Unclear and inconsistent guidance from regulators including the OCC and Federal Reserve, custody security concerns following incidents like this year’s Ledger breaches, and the tax and compliance complexity of digital assets have all slowed bank adoption.

Does this survey mean banks are ignoring cryptocurrency entirely?
No. It means most consumer-facing conversations about crypto are not happening yet, not that banks have no crypto activity at all. Many institutions have built custody or back-end infrastructure without extending that to customer advice or product awareness.

Is this the first survey to look at consumer views on bank-fintech-style regulation?
No. An earlier 2026 survey from the American Bankers Association and Morning Consult, covering more than 4,456 adults, found consumers want fintech firms offering bank-like services held to comparable rules as traditional banks.

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