Beyond speculation: Explaining the intention to use cryptocurrency
Article
Esmaeilzadeh, P, Cousins, K, Subramanian, H et al. (2026). Beyond speculation: Explaining the intention to use cryptocurrency
. INFORMATION & MANAGEMENT, 63(7), 10.1016/j.im.2026.104410
Esmaeilzadeh, P, Cousins, K, Subramanian, H et al. (2026). Beyond speculation: Explaining the intention to use cryptocurrency
. INFORMATION & MANAGEMENT, 63(7), 10.1016/j.im.2026.104410
Individual cryptocurrency adoption involves a financial decision-making problem that technology acceptance theories were not designed to solve. Where IS adoption requires users to judge a tool's fit for a task, cryptocurrency adoption requires users to evaluate speculative financial returns, irreversible transaction risks, inclusion benefits, and network externalities in a decentralized environment simultaneously. Recent fintech adoption research has begun to identify relevant drivers. However, it examines them in isolation, offering no integrated framework and no validated measurement instrument that captures the full benefit-risk space. This study addresses that gap through two contributions. First, we develop a theoretically grounded research model in which nine second-order constructs (financial inclusion, transaction convenience, financial benefit, network effects, transaction risk, market risk, reputation, structural provision, and early adopter traits) each make distinct, theoretically justified contributions to cryptocurrency adoption intention. These constructs emerged from a grounded theory analysis of three qualitative studies with 163 informants, providing domain-specific theoretical development grounded in data rather than incremental extensions of prior models. Second, we validate this framework through a rigorous 10-step instrument development procedure across four quantitative studies with 3098 respondents, yielding a fully validated measurement instrument for the field. The second-order model explains 61–69% of the variance in adoption intention across Bitcoin and Ethereum contexts and provides a marginally better fit and richer construct-level interpretability than a third-order aggregation. Our key finding is that financial benefit cannot be modeled as a variant of performance expectancy: it involves a speculative risk-return calculus that only utility-theoretic frameworks can capture. The validated instrument enables future researchers to conduct systematic, comparable research on cryptocurrency adoption.
