Crypto Boom Still Has Retail Investors ‘Sitting on Sidelines’

There are a lot of eyes on the cryptocurrency market these days amid its latest boom.

But as Bloomberg News reported Friday (Nov. 29), it’s a boom that retail investors may not be embracing the way they did during the pandemic, perhaps because they’re recalling how fast it took for that 2021 bubble to pop.

“From a retail perspective, interest is clearly growing as trading in bitcoin has picked up significantly,” said Josh Gilbert, market analyst at eToro. “However, we are yet to see the levels we’ve seen in previous cycles, which signals that we’ve got a wave of retail investors still sitting on the sidelines watching.”

Some industry players point to institutional bitcoin demand as the spark behind the $1 trillion jump in the crypto market that accompanied Donald Trump’s election victory last month. The incoming president had campaigned on the notion of more friendly crypto regulation and creation of a strategic U.S. bitcoin stockpile.

Others contend that retailer investors are already showing more engagement with the crypto sector, as evidenced by a recent record high of popular altcoin Solana, as well as increasing downloads of crypto exchange apps and the growing prevalence of meme coins on social media.

There are “clear signs that retail investors have returned to the crypto market post-election,” said Caroline Bowler, CEO of digital-asset exchange BTC Markets. 

A substantial number of trading accounts that had been sitting idle since 2020 and 2021 sprang back to life last month, she said. 

The report said Trump’s vow to turn the U.S. into the world’s crypto nexus and to roll back the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) crackdown on the sector, which followed a market rout and a wave of fraud within the industry. Trump’s presidency, Bloomberg said, is likely to bring “more crypto executives into the limelight.”

Among those executives is Justin Sun, a controversial crypto entrepreneur who last week invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial, becoming the largest investor in the Trump-backed crypto firm.

“I’m very optimistic about the Trump administration and their crypto regulation,” Sun told Bloomberg. 

The SEC charged Sun and his companies last year with fraud and other securities law violations, accusing them of making unregistered sales and offers. Sun has argued that he believes the SEC’s claims “lack merit.”