New Survey Characterizes Chinese Crypto Investors 

A survey of more than a thousand Chinese cryptocurrency investors shows that most of them – about 75% – are based in Shanghai and Beijing, while those overseas have a high concentration in Singapore.

The survey of 1,035 investors by Winkrypto, an advisory and marketing company founded in Singapore in 2019, was conducted between June 1 and June 30, 2022 as part of a market research to understand the habits of Chinese crypto investors, Foresight News reports. It shows that most of the investors are young with 38.6% of them under the age of 29 while almost 90% are below the age of 40.

While the survey seems to focus on the core investors whose characteristics seem to be different from that of the entire Chinese crypto industry audience, it shows that 66.1% of the respondents have an investment amount of more than $100,000. This includes 29% with cryptocurrency investment of up to $1 million, 12.5% with between $500,000 and $1 million and 24.6% investing between $100,00 and $500,000. However, the survey did not indicate how the investment values were calculated or any other information aside from the questionnaire for data collection considering that the Chinese government has placed a ban on crypto-related activities in the country including mining and trading between May and September 2021, while popular Chinese exchanges like Huobi retired their mainland Chinese users at the end of 2021 as a form of compliance.

Chinese and English dual options account for 59% of the respondents’ choice of language for receiving information about crypto and blockchain. When split, 24% of them prefer to receive their information in English while 16% go for the Chinese language. The figures indicate the English language’s influence on the mainstream Chinese crypto industry particularly as the survey also highlights that most of the respondents depend on Twitter over WeChat as their preferred channel of receiving information.

Coindesk, Cointelegraph, and crypto market intelligence provider, Messari, top the list of the respondents’ frequently read English blockchain media, while the main channels used by communities are WeChat, Telegram, Discord, and Twitter. The findings suggest that the communities depend on these channels to trace the root of their information source, seek to understand the information on a first-hand basis, and maintain the tendency of independent judgment.

Though IOSG, Hashkey, and Fenbushi are the top frequently mentioned local crypto investment firms among Chinese investors, the survey indicates a big gap in respondents’ mention of foreign investment firms for opinions – about 30% say they pay attention to the foreign firms. Top among them is A16Z which is mentioned by nearly 54% of the surveyed population followed by Paradigm, Binance Labs, and Multicoin with a rate of about 20% each.

For key opinion leaders (KOLs), the top names that most of the investors follow or track on a daily basis according to a frequency graph from the respondents’ mentions are Ethereum’s lead developer, Vitalik Buterin, and Binance’s Changpeng CZ Zhao, as well as Fishkiller aka Feng Liu.

Others are the co-founder of F2Pool and Cobo, Bitfish1, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nake13 aka Zhixiong Pan, the billionaire founder of FTX exchange, SBF (Samuel Bankman-Fried), dForce Network’s Mindao, the co-founder of troubled Three Arrows Capital (3AC), ZhuSu and Phyrex_Ni of Phyrexia.eth. Of the 2228 KOLs named by respondents, these top 10 are mentioned 566 times, the survey finds.

The top five crypto tracks for Chinese investors are NFT, DeFi, infrastructure, Metaverse, and DAO – in the same order – while GameFi and SocialFi are behind.