Crypto Marketing Statistics 2026: FCA Rules, Ad Bans and Search Demand

Marketing a crypto business in the UK is not like marketing anything else. Since October 2023 a cryptoasset promotion has been a financial promotion in law, which means the ordinary growth playbook of referral bonuses, sign-up rewards and "invite a friend" credits is not something you can optimise. It is banned.

That has pushed crypto marketing into a strange shape. Paid channels are gated behind regulator registration, incentive levers are switched off, and the biggest driver of demand is something no marketing team controls: the price chart.

Key crypto marketing statistics for 2026

• 8% of UK adults hold cryptoassets, down from 12% a year earlier, per the FCA's Cryptoassets consumer research 2025 (YouGov, n=2,353). [1][2]
• Social media is the most common place UK consumers recall seeing a crypto ad (48%), ahead of online advertising (38%) and online news and forums (26%), per the FCA. [1]
• Only 36% of people who recalled a crypto ad said it clearly stated the investment was high risk, up from 32% in 2024, per the FCA. [1]
• All 19 crypto rulings returned by the ASA rulings database were upheld, none dismissed, as at August 2026. [6]
• Coinbase spent $1.06bn on sales and marketing in 2025, up 62% and equal to 15% of net revenue against 10% in 2024, per its Form 10-K. [10]
• The FCA found 1,267 illegal financial adverts in one April 2026 week of action, reaching at least 2,338,372 UK accounts, 66% from parties already on its Warning List. [4]
• UK search demand for "bitcoin" peaked near 1.85m in January 2021 and sat around 219,000 in July 2026, on Ahrefs volume history. [14]
• Global crypto ownership is estimated at 741 million people at end-2025, up 12.4% on 659 million, per Crypto.com Research. [13]
• 25% of UK crypto users encountered or suspected fraud, and 87% of those personally victimised lost money, per the FCA. [1]

How many people in the UK actually own crypto?

Eight per cent of UK adults held cryptoassets as of September 2025, down from 12% in 2024 but still double the 2021 level. Roughly one adult in twelve, against near-total awareness of the category.

The research is a YouGov online panel survey with 2,353 nationally representative interviews plus a booster of 1,053 current or former owners. Ownership skews sharply: 11% of men, 15% of 18 to 34 year olds, 19% of people from an ethnic minority background, 10% of ABC1 social grades. [1]

A 33% year-on-year decline in the owner base is not a rounding error, and it happened in a year when institutional adoption stories dominated the trade press. Globally the direction is the opposite: Chainalysis ranked the UK 11th on its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index and put value received across Europe at $2.6tn in the 12 months to June 2025, up 42%. [12]

The practical read is that the UK addressable market is small, concentrated and demographically narrow. If your media plan assumes broad consumer reach, you are paying to talk to the 92% who own nothing.

What does the FCA financial promotions regime actually ban?

The cryptoasset financial promotions regime took effect on 8 October 2023 under rules set out in PS23/6. The headline restriction for growth teams is COBS 4.12A, which bans firms from promoting cryptoassets that offer a retail client any monetary or non-monetary incentive to invest. [3]

The FCA's good and poor practice review is blunt about scope. The ban "applies to incentives offered to retail clients as part of a financial promotion, even when there is no requirement to invest to gain the benefit" and "regardless of the rationale for offering the incentive, which consumer it is aimed at, or whether it might be incentivising actions related to investing, such as registration or sign-up." [3]

That kills refer-a-friend credits, new joiner bonuses, deposit-match offers and most loyalty rewards aimed at UK retail. It also catches ongoing perks buried deep in the product, which the FCA noted was where the least-prepared firms were exposed. [3]

Behind the ban sit the operational rules that cost more to build: a 24-hour cooling-off period for first-time investors, personalised risk warnings, client categorisation and an appropriateness assessment. The FCA found these "back end" requirements, not the ad creative, were where firms struggled. [3]

How hard is the FCA actually enforcing this?

Hard, and increasingly through the platforms rather than the firms. Since the regime came in the FCA says it has issued over 2,300 alerts, taken down more than 1,000 scam websites and removed dozens of harmful apps. [1] Across all sectors, its interventions led to 19,766 promotions being amended or withdrawn by authorised firms in 2024, up 97.5% on 10,008 in 2023. [5]

The finfluencer numbers are the ones crypto marketers should read twice. In an April 2026 week of action led by the FCA and joined by 17 regulators, the FCA made 120 account takedown requests and identified 1,267 illegal financial adverts within those accounts, reaching at least 2,338,372 UK accounts. Sixty-six per cent came from firms or individuals already on its Warning List. [4] An earlier June 2025 action produced three arrests with City of London Police support. [15]

Two thirds of that illegal advertising came from actors the FCA had already publicly flagged, and it was still running. If you rely on creator marketing, platform enforcement will not keep your brand from sitting next to it.

Which advertising platforms will accept crypto ads, and on what terms?

Both allow crypto advertising, but only for a narrow set of categories and only with prior certification. Neither will run ads for the thing most crypto firms want to advertise.

Google's Cryptocurrencies and related products policy restricts crypto exchanges, software wallets, hardware wallets and coin trusts to certified advertisers, and to target the UK requires that "the advertiser is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)". Prohibited outright are "ads promoting initial coin offerings, DeFi trading protocols, or the purchase, sale, or trade of cryptocurrencies or related products", plus trading signals, investment advice and crypto comparison sites. [8]

X's financial services policy prohibits ICOs, IEOs and IDExOs and bans mining hardware promotion. UK advertisers must hold FCA or Gibraltar Financial Services Commission authorisation, and crypto derivatives promotion is prohibited in the UK. Belgium, Greece, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia and Ukraine cannot advertise crypto and DeFi at all. [9]

Google allows mining hardware ads without certification and X bans them, so one creative brief run across both networks will trip. The comparison-site prohibition on Google is the quieter problem. Much of the financial affiliate model in other verticals runs on "best X for Y" pages buying brand-adjacent terms. Google closes that door on the paid side, pushing crypto affiliates into organic and into channels with weaker disclosure norms.

How many crypto ads has the ASA banned, and did any survive?

Every crypto ruling in the ASA's published database has gone against the advertiser. A search of the ASA rulings database for "cryptocurrency" in August 2026 returned 19 formal rulings, all upheld, plus one informally resolved case. Filtering by "cryptoasset" returned 18, again all upheld. [6]

Seven were published on a single day, 15 December 2021, in a sweep covering Coinbase, Kraken, Luno, eToro, CoinBurp and Exmo. The most common breach was irresponsibly taking advantage of consumers' inexperience and failing to illustrate investment risk. [6]

The most recent shows the ASA has not lost interest. On 28 January 2026 it upheld 35 complaints against CB Payments Ltd, trading as Coinbase, over a video-on-demand ad and three posters built on cost-of-living slogans such as "HOME OWNERSHIP OUT OF REACH" and "REAL WAGES STUCK IN 2008", tagged "IF EVERYTHING'S FINE DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING". [7]

Coinbase argued the campaign was satire and that UK consumers were becoming more crypto-literate. The ASA disagreed, ruling under CAP rule 1.3 that the ads trivialised the risks and implied crypto was a solution to genuine financial hardship. [7]

The lesson is not "avoid satire". It is that where 92% of UK adults hold nothing, a regulator reads your ad through the eyes of the person most likely to be harmed by it.

Where do crypto buyers actually get their information?

Not from advertising. Asked what sources they consulted before buying, users put online forums (36%) and friends, family or colleagues (36%) joint first, followed by social media platforms (29%) and the exchange itself (25%). [1]

On first exposure, traditional news and media remains the top route at 25%, with social media at 22%, up from just 10% in 2021. Online advertising accounts for 5% and traditional advertising 3%. [1]

That is a community-led acquisition curve, which is why Discord servers, Telegram groups and Reddit threads matter more to crypto growth than a media plan does. It is also where the promotions regime is hardest to police, because peer conversation and unauthorised promotion look identical from the outside.

Advertising's measured effect is modest. Sixty-seven per cent of people who recalled a crypto ad said it did not change their attitude, up from 57% in 2024, while 15% said it made them curious but not enough to buy and 8% said it actively discouraged them. [1]

Among existing users the picture flips: 26% said ads encouraged a purchase they were already contemplating, against 2% of non-users. [1] Crypto advertising is a reactivation channel dressed up as an acquisition channel.

What does crypto search demand look like across a price cycle?

It tracks price, with a lag of roughly nothing. Ahrefs monthly volume history for the UK query "bitcoin" shows about 281,000 searches in January 2020, a peak of roughly 1,853,000 in January 2021, and about 219,000 in July 2026, with secondary peaks in November 2024 (about 1,048,000) and February 2026 (about 796,000). [14]

Head terms stay enormous in absolute terms: Ahrefs put UK monthly volume at 1,090,000 for "bitcoin price" and 465,000 for "bitcoin", against 3,400 for "buy bitcoin uk". [14]

The gap between 1.09m price-checking searches and 3,000 exchange-comparison searches is the whole commercial problem in one line. Almost all crypto search volume is informational and non-monetisable, and the tiny commercial tail carries CPCs of $3.50 to $5.00 with keyword difficulty in the 60s and 70s.

Brand search dwarfs generic commercial search by roughly 20 to 1 for the largest players. Where paid acquisition is gated, brand recall is the moat.

What are the big exchanges actually spending on marketing?

Coinbase gives the clearest public answer, because it files with the SEC. Sales and marketing expense reached $1,058,577,000 in 2025, up 62% on 2024 and rising from 10% to 15% of net revenue. Monthly transacting users rose 10% to 9.2 million and trading volume 3% to $1,221bn, while net income fell 51% to $1,260m. [10]

Read those rows together and the story is not flattering. Marketing spend up 62%, users up 10%, profit down 51%. On a simple division, sales and marketing per monthly transacting user rose from roughly $78 to roughly $115 in a year.

The USDC rewards line is worth pausing on. It is the largest single component of Coinbase's marketing spend and is, functionally, a monetary incentive paid to holders. That is precisely the mechanic the FCA's incentives ban removes from the UK retail toolkit.

How much does fraud shape crypto marketing?

More than any other single factor, because it sets the trust ceiling every crypto brand advertises under. A quarter (25%) of UK crypto users have encountered or suspected fraud, scams or crime involving cryptoassets, and 7% say they were personally a victim. [1]

Among those who encountered something, 41% cited social media scams including fake endorsements or giveaways, 40% fake websites or phishing, and 34% investment schemes promising high returns. Of those personally victimised, 87% lost money, though that sub-sample is under 100 respondents. [1]

Globally, Chainalysis estimates illicit crypto addresses received at least $154bn in 2025, up 162% year on year, with stablecoins accounting for 84% of illicit volume. Even so, the illicit share of all attributed transaction volume "remains below 1%". [11]

Note the direction of the top category. The most common fraud experience is a fake endorsement on social media, the same channel where 48% of consumers recall seeing legitimate crypto advertising. [1] Every pound a compliant brand spends on paid social buys attention in an environment consumers have learned to distrust.

There is a counterweight. A quarter of UK crypto users said they would be more likely to invest if cryptocurrencies were more regulated, and 26% said regulation would make them more confident. Only 11% said less likely. [1] Compliance is not purely a cost centre here.

How to read these numbers

The FCA figures come from an online YouGov panel. The FCA itself flags that this excludes digitally excluded adults and "could overestimate the number of cryptoasset users in the UK". [1] Ad recall is self-reported, with the usual memory and social desirability problems, and the 12% to 8% ownership drop is a survey-to-survey comparison, not a tracked panel.

The ASA ruling count is a database search result, not an official tally. It covers formally investigated complaints the ASA published and excludes cases resolved informally or handled by the FCA. A 100% upheld rate partly reflects selection: the ASA prioritises cases it expects to uphold.

Ahrefs search volumes are clickstream-modelled estimates, not Google-reported figures, and differ from Keyword Planner and Google Trends for the same terms. Use them for relative scale, not forecasting.

Chainalysis is explicit that its illicit-volume figure is "a lower-bound estimate based on illicit addresses we've identified to date" and gets revised upward later. [11] The Crypto.com owner count is an on-chain estimate, counting addresses rather than verified humans. [13] Coinbase's disclosures are audited but are one company's US-listed accounts.

What this means going into 2027

The incentives ban is the strategic fact, not a compliance footnote. If your growth model depends on referral loops or reward mechanics, the UK needs a different plan, built on brand, education and product rather than paid acquisition levers.

Community is the acquisition channel, whether you resource it or not. With 36% of buyers consulting online forums and 29% consulting social platforms before purchase, the Discord and Telegram layer is where the decision happens, and owning it responsibly is cheaper than fighting for the tiny commercial search tail.

Expect platform gatekeeping to tighten. The FCA has said plainly that social media platforms "are not doing enough to uphold their own policies", and it now measures the reach of illegal ads. [4] More verification friction is the likely response.

Plan media around the price cycle, not the financial year. UK crypto search demand has moved more than eightfold between trough and peak since 2020, so a flat monthly budget baseline will overpay in cold markets and underbuy in hot ones.

Finally, treat trust as the conversion variable. Where the most common scam experience is a fake endorsement, visible authorisation and honest risk disclosure are not a drag on performance. They are the performance. If you want help working out how findable your crypto business really is in search and AI answers, you can book a call with me.