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. The survey 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 gives the average investor a score of just 4.83 out of 10. Nexo says the score 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 between owning crypto and building wealth with it.
The index, introduced for the first time in this report, scores investors from 1 to 10 across five equally weighted dimensions. These include the share of a portfolio held 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. The company argues that most existing adoption surveys stop at whether someone holds an asset, rather than examining how central it has become to their financial planning. The survey was fielded in February and March 2026 through the research platform Attest. Respondents were screened for a minimum of $100,000 in liquid assets in the US and UK and $40,000 in Argentina. These thresholds were 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. He added that what 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. The report links those differences to local conditions rather than crypto itself. In Argentina, adoption looks more like a shift away from cash, which the report connects to years of currency depreciation and capital controls. In the United States, crypto instead competes directly with equity allocations. That is a higher bar, but once cleared, it 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. There, 65% of respondents hold crypto, but the average score is 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. Nexo says that group makes up 4.7% of the sample. Newer entrants cite unfamiliarity with digital assets and volatility as their leading obstacles. The report describes these concerns 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%. These rank ahead of tax uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty, and fiat conversion, each cited by 21%. Nexo sells crypto-backed loans, yield products, and a crypto debit card. It frames these frictions 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, wealth platforms, exchanges with managed products, and advisors serving high-net-worth clients need to offer tools built for traditional assets. These include yield on idle balances, liquidity access without a forced sale, and integration with retirement and tax planning. More education aimed at first-time buyers would not address those needs. “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. 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. The survey does not establish whether the identified frictions, especially security and fees, are specific to how affluent investors currently access crypto through existing platforms. It also does not test whether they would hold up under different custody and product structures. The findings predate any changes Nexo or competitors might make in response to them, so the survey cannot determine on its own whether that friction narrows going forward.
