eToro, the well-known social trading platform that deals with commodities, stocks, ETFs and crypto assets, has revealed that findings from a recent market survey shows heavy interest in crypto assets from the millennial generation.
eToro’s market survey offers several interesting insights into how the masses would react to crypto developments.
Most notably, 71% of millennials surveyed said that they would “invest in crypto if it was offered by traditional financial institutions.” Just as notably, however, more than of the respondents have more trust in cryptocurrency exchanges than they do in the U.S. stock market — and that’s despite the fact that exchanges are still dealing with problems such as hacks and general security issues.
Managing Director of eToro US, Guy Hirsch, had a lot to say about the shift in perception:
We’re seeing the beginning of a generational shift in trust from traditional stock exchanges to crypto exchanges. At the heart of this change are the asset classes themselves. Younger investors’ experience with the stock market has seen a great deal of loss of trust, with the fall of Lehman Brothers …Trust further eroded when Americans saw how hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers money are funneled to the largest financial institutions while their savings evaporated and how banks get free money through quantitative easing while their cost of living continued to rise.
As for why millennials consider crypto exchanges to be safer, Hirsch said:
Immutability is native to blockchains and that makes real-time audit to be sensible and cost-effective and that is why Millennials and Gen X perceive crypto exchanges as less likely to be subject to manipulation and less likely to be a place where bad actors get rewarded with taxpayer money. As more investors become educated on the benefits of blockchain we’ll continue to see this trend play out.
The key takeaway from the report is that young investors are more than happy to invest in crypto assets if they were offered by financial institutions, possibly because it would put them more at ease to trade on a platform that was regulated.
Furthermore, respondents also expressed interest in the idea of allocating crypto in their 401k portfolio, but Hirsch explains that would be have to accompanied by a few changes:
While there is clearly a demand for crypto assets in 401k portfolios, there are a number of regulatory and market changes that need to occur before it becomes a mainstream offering. We would need to see more advisors become educated on crypto assets and getting comfortable …Mainstream traction will also be aided by the approval of ETFs that track crypto assets. At that point, we could see crypto offerings in 401k portfolios.
And while investors are still waiting on a Bitcoin ETF approval, there is a good chance that there is an approval on the horizon, which means that young investors could soon hold crypto in their 401k portfolios.
In the meantime, savvy millennials can still navigate their own way through the bear market, if they do their research on cryptocurrency and are prudent about their crypto investment strategies.
