Why black investors, in particular, are feeling the chill of the crypto winter.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

It's been a tough year for cryptocurrencies, between the parade of scandals and the sinking

valuations.

When there's evidence, black investors may be getting hit especially hard.

Marketplace host and senior correspondent Kimberley Adams has been looking into this.

She said crypto markets have disproportionately drawn in black investors in recent years.

According to the 2022 Aurel Schwab black investor survey, last year a quarter of black

Americans owned crypto compared to 15% of white investors.

For Terry Bradford, she first started noticing the crypto ads when a lot of us did, during

last year's Super Bowl, especially the one with LeBron James talking to his younger

self.

And then Bradford, a payment specialist at the Kansas City Federal Reserve, noticed that

a lot of the ads seemed very targeted to black audiences.

You could see that Spike Lee was promoting crypto and you would hear about it in terms

of athletes that began taking their salaries in crypto.

And Bradford saw the influence of those ads in surveys about just who was getting into

crypto.

According to the Aurel Schwab black investor survey, for some respondents, crypto currencies

were the first investment product they ever purchased.

So black investors are basically twice as likely to say that crypto was their first investment

...