Why the Unbanked Turn to Crypto
- Veronica Irwin
- Apr 19
- 5 min read
Veronica's work with Paradigm shows how crypto serves the unbanked. What could that mean for the sector?
11/30/2025
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Banks Left Them Out. Crypto Let Them In.
One of crypto’s oldest and best-known use cases is for cross border payments. Proponents talk of long wait times and high fees short-circuited with stablecoins. But this problem may not sound particularly urgent or dire to the uninitiated. That is, unless you regularly send money to other countries. Let me set the stage.
International remittances are among the slowest and most expensive transactions in traditional finance. A transfer from, say, the United States to Senegal can take up to five days to settle and cost as much as $50. That is an annoyance for most businesses, but that delay can be devastating when the money is meant for an emergency, or when the sender is low-income and every dollar matters.
After years of reporting on tech hype cycles and valuation-driven narratives, I found myself drawn to a technology aiming to solve a practical, deeply human problem. People sending money abroad were often marginalized by the financial system. Crypto offered a way back in. That realization has kept me covering these issues for six years.
So when Paradigm’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, Justin Slaughter, asked me to research how unbanked and underbanked people use crypto, I jumped at the chance. Globally, about 1.4 billion adults are unbanked, according to the World Bank. According to federal government data, roughly 16 million adults lacked a bank account in 2024, and another 13.8 million were underbanked — technically banked, but reliant on non-bank services like remittances or check cashing to meet their core financial needs.
Over six weeks, we analyzed existing research and conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with eleven people across these groups to better understand how crypto fits into their daily lives. Here’s what we found.
Crypto Changes How People Think about Money.
Across the board, interviewees consistently emphasized that crypto changed how they conceptualized and managed their money. Whereas they had previously thought of money solely as a means to buy goods and services, crypto inspired them to think about money as an asset to grow.
The interviewees I spoke with were diverse. Most were based in the United States, though some were living abroad in countries in Europe and Africa. Of those living in the U.S., I spoke with immigrants who had documentation issues, immigrants on visas or who had gotten citizenship, and natural-born American citizens. Most of the people I spoke with were low-income or middle class, but two had amassed significant wealth. The interviewees’ ages ranged from early 20s to mid-50s. Some I found actively sharing tips on Reddit and X, while others hardly spent time on social media at all.
For those stretching every dollar, stablecoins and staking rewards offered the possibility of small but meaningful returns. For wealthier interviewees, automated lending protocols created flexibility, allowing them to borrow against holdings and smooth out financial shocks.
Taking direct responsibility for their assets, instead of trusting a bank or payment processor, created a noticeable psychological shift. As one interviewee, who we gave the pseudonym London, put it: “It’s all about my choice. [Crypto] gives me more control — I don’t need a bank to access funds. I just need my phone.”
Online Crypto Payments Feel Safer.
Many interviewees also said they felt more secure transacting online with crypto than with traditional debit or credit cards. Part of this stemmed from the same mindset shift: crypto nudged them to learn how the technology worked instead of blindly typing card numbers into checkout windows. Crypto taught interviewees to rely on themselves, rather than financial intermediaries.
They appreciated that sending crypto required only a public wallet address, not full payment details. Multiple interviewees had experienced credit-card theft after online purchases, while others had cards frozen because automated fraud controls didn’t account for their immigration status or inconsistent access to identity documents. Crypto felt simpler, safer, and less dependent on institutions that had failed them.
The interviews were a good reminder of the profound impact of being able to send money directly between one account to another, peer-to-peer. Intermediation introduces risk.
Efficiency isn’t just a buzzword.
Applications like Zelle or Venmo can make sending money seem like it’s fast and cheap these days, but those systems aren’t reliable if you can’t get a bank account. Interviewees bemoaned the fact that even using prepaid cards for these systems came with fees or troublesome hurdles, while the same issues with identity documents could make it difficult to register.
Crypto’s reputation for speed and low cost often gets dismissed as marketing language. But this study reminded me how important efficiency really is, especially for people shunned by traditional finance.
Crypto, by contrast, let them send and receive money within minutes. Gas fees were an annoyance, but still dramatically cheaper than payday loans, non-bank money orders, or cross-border remittance services. For interviewees supporting families abroad, the difference between a five-day wire and a two-minute stablecoin transfer was transformative. Many described crypto payments as simply “seamless.”
“You notice how swift payments can be made — it’s not the same with a bank,” one interviewee, who we gave the pseudonym Simon, told me. “With cryptocurrency I don’t have to go to the bank to do anything, I can do it from the comfort of my home. But then with traditional banks you have to make extra efforts, sometimes there’s delays, and it’s just a whole lot of stress.”
More Work to Be Done
Crypto is often portrayed as a speculative casino full of hype and scams. And for some of the industry, that criticism may be valid. But our study shows that for an overlooked group of people, crypto payments are genuinely useful. They’re cheaper, faster, and easier to use than the tools available to them in traditional finance, and in many cases gave people access to digital payments they were completely unable to use before.
Talking to interviewees, many of whom taught themselves everything they knew about crypto, was a reminder of why I cover this space. I hope the findings remind others in crypto why their work matters.
More importantly, I hope the work reminds crypto entrepreneurs to build products that don’t only fuel the aggregation of wealth, but also accelerate inclusion. Making apps easier to use, more secure, or more efficient isn’t always sexy. But it’s these simple improvements that compound, and which make crypto such a transformative technology.
That said, this research is only a beginning. The study was qualitative and small in scope. Major gaps remain in our understanding of how and why unbanked and underbanked people use digital assets, especially outside stablecoins, and especially when it comes to more quantitative assessments. I plan to continue this work and hope others will join in closing those gaps.
For more context, please read my blog on the Paradigm website here, or view the full report here. You can also watch me discuss our research at the most recent Pretty Good Policy for Crypto briefing here.
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