Getting a bead on how people are feeling about crypto.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes. Here at Marketplace, we often report on a monthly economic indicator from the University of Michigan called the Consumer Sentiment Index.

It basically looks at how people are feeling about the economy.

Now a team of academics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School have used that index as a model to create something similar, though much more niche.

It measures how people are feeling about cryptocurrency.

It's called the Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index, which is a monthly survey, now in its third year.

I asked Wharton Marketing Professor Dave Rebstein, one of the creators of the index, what he hopes to accomplish with it.

Hopefully, what it is that I'm going to be able to do is start to predict what's going to happen

with crypto prices and use it as a guide for people about should you be investing should you

not be investing and we could give some guidance about you know this appears to be a good

currency to be investing in.

And by the way, I refer to it as a currency.

I don't actually think of crypto as a currency.

And I don't think people do either.

I think that they view it as a risky stock that one could be investing in seems to be on the rise right now.

Why not ride the coattails of this comment?

How much does the price of Bitcoin affect how consumers feel about cryptocurrency?

As the price goes up, people feel more confident. As they feel more confident,

prices go up. For example, if you look at our index that we have, it actually peaked around

April of last year. And it started to go down while the prices were still going up. And then we see subsequently

the prices sort of steady, and then the prices starting to come down. I fully anticipate we're

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