As the cryptocurrency industry continues to capture public attention and gain value, serious questions about consumer trust remain. Wharton marketing’s William Stewart Woodside Professor, David Reibstein, joined Tsai Wan-Tsai Professor Z. John Zhang on Knowledge at Wharton’s Ripple Effect podcast to discuss the future of cryptocurrency with host Dan Loney. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dan Loney: Cryptocurrency is starting to have an impact on a large segment of the population. Has it developed to the point where it’s the success that a lot of people think it should be?
David Reibstein: It is certainly progressing. I don’t think it took off like people were anticipating. It’s had its ups and downs, but it hasn’t replaced other forms of currency.
John Zhang: I think that there is no better time for cryptocurrency than now. You see that with Donald Trump [W68] elected as the president — there’s going to be a whole lot more institutional support for cryptocurrency. And if you look at the history, Bitcoin was only less than pennies in 2009. Now, it’s over $91,000. So there’s a long runway ahead of us.
DL: There are so many different types of cryptocurrency out there — that would potentially impact the pricing, wouldn’t it?
JZ: Absolutely. A couple years ago, there were over 10,000 different cryptocurrencies circulating in the marketplace. And you can imagine that not every one of them will survive.
DR: Bitcoin is going to exist for a long time. Ethereum is going to be out there. There are a few others that are going to dominate the market. But there’s going to be this long tail of other brands that are still out there. It’s not like we have to worry about shelf space, like we do for physical products.
DL: With the way pricing has fluctuated over the past several years, you would think there might be more skepticism around cryptocurrency. But there still seems to be very much a fervor about what it might be in the years ahead.
JZ: When you look at Bitcoin, there is absolutely no intrinsic value to it. It’s not like gold. Which means that ultimately, the price hinges on the collective beliefs amongst the customers and the investors. If they believe that this particular currency is going to become the unit of exchange, you can imagine that value can increase tremendously. You see some countries, like El Salvador, begin to actually use cryptocurrency for the national economy. In fact, Trump even proposed that we’re going to have a strategic reserve of Bitcoin.
DR: Most people are viewing it like an investment. Most investments that we make — “Well, I’m going to own some of this share of a company” — there’s something behind that. Companies sell, and they end up generating cash for us. Here, it’s total speculation. That’s why what we’re working on, which is looking at consumers’ confidence in it, is part of what’s highly tied to what the particular prices are. It basically is this huge speculation, almost like tulips back in the old tulip market in Holland.
DL: This is leading to a confidence index that you and your colleagues are putting together.
DR: That’s right. Every month for the last several months — I think we’re now at 18 months — we take a survey of 1,000 people across the United States, and we ask them how confident they are in the currency. We have three questions: How confident are you about it for yourself? How confident are you for the economy? Do you want to invest more in cryptocurrency? We’re trying to relate that to the price of crypto itself. And we would anticipate that as people are more confident, we’re going to see prices going up.
DL: How do you see having an index that can be used as a tool having a potential impact on the pricing moving forward?
JZ: There are about 20 million Bitcoins that are already mined. I think the last coin is expected to be mined around 2140. Given that supply is mostly fixed, you can imagine the price of Bitcoin will depend on the demand. Hopefully, what we could do is look into the consumer confidence and see if that could forecast the price change.
DL: How do some of the instances of fraud around cryptocurrency factor into the perceptions of the public?
DR: Whenever there’s any hint of fraud — you know, the big arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried — you would anticipate this is just going to crash the market. I actually have been surprised by how resilient the market is. It says people believe in this overall concept more than this or that particular individual.
JZ: It’s almost like the U.S. dollar. You have scandals here and there. You have the dirty money. But it doesn’t really affect the value of dollars. But for cryptocurrency, we probably have gotten beyond the point where a small scandal is going to sink the whole boat.
DL: Because investors know there’s a component of risk built into this marketplace anyway?
JZ: Exactly.
DR: Part of it is this whole notion of distributed trust. People that believe in distributed trust are more likely to be investing in crypto and take it away from the major institutions, so there’s no one institution that holds so much power in the overall system. That’s what has attracted a number of people to the currency. It was supposed to be this non-institutional entity, and now the institutions are really investing in it.
DL: Where is the future larger-scale ownership in and around cryptocurrency?
DR: I think we are going to see it more in our 401(k)s. You could think of it as: This is just another one of my stock holdings. It’s part of my portfolio. We’ve asked people, “Would you want to be paid in crypto, or would you rather be paid in cash?” And people say, “I want to be paid in cash.” We’re going to get to this stage where people say, “Pay me in crypto.” And, “I want to invest in crypto, just as I would any other stock.”
JZ: As marketing professors, we think that marketing will play a huge role in actualizing the value of cryptocurrencies. They all use more or less the same kind of technology. So ultimately, marketing efforts will make a huge difference in whether or not the whole industry is going to consolidate on a particular cryptocurrency versus somebody else.
DR: One of the industries that invest a lot in advertising is financial institutions. Why? Well, I want you to have confidence in us. And so there’s more marketing that’s going behind trying to create a brand.
DL: Don’t cryptocurrencies gain a level of security by being connected with financial institutions?
JZ: They do.
DR: Which is so ironic, because part of the reason for the cryptocurrency is to decouple from the financial institutions.
DL: What do you think are the next areas that need to be investigated?
DR: One of the things that we’re thinking about is the “crypto creep.” More and more people are starting to use it. We’re trying to track and predict retail acceptance. You mentioned some places starting to take it. We at Wharton took it — you could pay for a course in crypto. Can we anticipate which stores end up taking it? And which types of people? I should quiz you, because I’m a professor: Does the East Coast, the West Coast, or the Midwest own more crypto?
DL: I’m gonna say West Coast.
DR: You’re wrong. And if your next guess was East Coast, you’re wrong.
DL: Really? The Midwest?
DR: That was most surprising to us. And part of that is, they are opposed to that centralized control.
DL: John, what’s still piquing your interest?
JZ: This idea of distributed trust is pretty new. That’s definitely one big topic. And we want to know what underlies the changes in prices. Is there any way that we can predict how they would change? There’s a lot of modeling and data collection and processing to do.
Published as “True Believers” in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
