Ask yourself which Americans are most enamored of crypto, and a few descriptors may come to mind: Millennials. Techies. Guys.

Republicans? Maybe not.

But new research from the University of Pennsylvania finds that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to invest in cryptocurrency and that some regions are more inclined than others to hop on the bandwagon. Texans, for example, are fonder of bitcoin than Oregonians.

The study may help explain why President-elect Donald Trump has loudly signaled his support for crypto.

“I think Trump was a follower on this,” said David Reibstein, a marketing professor at Penn’s Wharton School who participated in the research. “I think he discovered his base was much more pro-crypto.”

Reibstein and his colleagues have spent two years collecting data about crypto from surveys of more than 22,000 Americans.

Among their key findings:

• Republicans are more likely than Democrats to own crypto, by a margin of 41% to 32%.

• Conservatives are more confident than liberals in crypto.

• Crypto is most popular in Texas and across the Southeast. It’s least popular in parts of the Northeast, such as Connecticut and New Hampshire, and in the Pacific Northwest.

The Wharton researchers assembled a detailed demographic and political profile of the typical American crypto investor.

Some of their findings match common wisdom about the crypto community. Men, for example, are more than twice as likely as women to own crypto, according to the Penn surveys.

Millennials are the most ardent crypto fans. People from 25 to 44 are most likely to invest in crypto, the researchers found, followed by people 45 to 64, a span that includes members of Generation X and the youngest baby boomers.

Seniors and young adults 18 to 24 are least likely to own crypto, but probably for different reasons. Older Americans tend to mistrust crypto, Reibstein said, while young adults may lack the funds to buy it.

And why do Republicans like crypto? The reason, Reibstein said, has a lot to do with decentralization.

Cryptocurrency is digital money. It isn’t issued by governments or banks, so there’s no central authority. It exists on decentralized networks and uses a technology called blockchain, which tracks transactions and assets.

“And it’s hard to separate decentralization from political affiliation,” Reibstein said. Republicans tend to favor decentralized government.

The Penn research shows conservative Americans are fans of “distributed trust.”

Many conservatives, the researchers found, would rather see trust divvied up among many individual entities than concentrated in a large one, such as the Federal Reserve or a multinational bank.

That notion squares with well-worn stereotypes of conservatives favoring state rights over federal power and small government over big.

“The origin of bitcoin is libertarian,” said Hanna Halaburda, associate professor of technology, operations and statistics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Libertarianism prizes civil liberties and free markets and eschews government regulation and overreach.

Halaburda cites Texas, which has emerged as a leader in the crypto industry, as perhaps the quintessential crypto-libertarian state.

The Penn research casts liberals and Democrats as defenders of the banking industry and the Fed, at least in the context of crypto. That finding might seem counterintuitive, given that progressives, historically, have taken pride in challenging authority.

In the case of crypto, counter-cultural thinking emanates from the right.

“The idea here is for people to organize themselves and conduct transactions without using banks,” said Jim Harper, a crypto expert and senior nonresident fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

“This is about replacing the banking industry with software. This is anti-establishment stuff.”

During the Vietnam War, hippies positioned themselves as anti-establishment and leftist. Harper sees conservative crypto fans of today as “Trumpian-style hippies.”

Both he and Reibstein believe Trump embraced crypto belatedly as a means to stay in sync with his base. In his first term as president, Trump opposed crypto and said the digital currency was “based on thin air.”

In his second term, Trump has vowed to make America the “crypto capital of the planet” and accumulate a national stockpile of bitcoin.

“Trump figured it out and made his overture to the bitcoin community in the last election,” Harper said. “They were all there, waiting for him.”

Trump’s support of crypto broadened its popularity among Republicans. In monthly surveys, the Penn researchers found that the share of Republicans who owned crypto rose in the final months of 2024, from about 36% in August and September to 43% in December, a month after Trump was elected to another term in the White House.

One lingering question for the Penn researchers is whether most Americans view crypto as a currency or an investment.

“There are about 38,000 ATMs that take crypto,” Reibstein said. He saw one at a Costco the other day.

As more crypto cash machines come online, Reibstein said, “I think people are going to start to view it more as a currency than they do today.”

But Americans’ confidence in crypto is not absolute.

For example, 54% of respondents told Penn researchers they would be comfortable making an online purchase with crypto. However, just 7% said they would be willing to take their salaries in crypto.

Harper, the crypto scholar, noted that he previously worked for the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group. He was paid partly in bitcoin.

“My wife made me transfer it into dollars straightaway,” he said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Republicans were into crypto long before Trump. Here's why.