🎬Introduction

The world's financial system has been changing headlong, picking up speed every year. We cannot imagine managing our money routine without online banking anymore. Bank branches have been giving up handling cash, and new banks often do not even have physical offices for clients altogether. Lending platforms transform products down to such old ones as mortgages. And now, with cryptocurrencies having entered the field, more and more people believe they are the true future of finance.

However, what once was believed to be a utopian dream of overly optimistic geeky youngsters, is now a trending multibillion-dollar sector of economics attracting the interest of more and more institutional investors and governments worldwide. VC firms dedicate capital to fund crypto startups, and new VCs dedicated to DeFi or NFT space open up their doors. Even such mastodons as JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs now have their blockchain divisions or even launch their own digital coins.

The change affects not only financial products, underlying technology, and businesses that develop them. Consumer of financial services has an entirely new face. Drastic differences between generations have never been so evident as now. We can see daily how technology changed the Millennials' approach to consuming goods and information and how Gen Z took it even a step further.

A variety of fintech and social media tools allowed Millennials to approach the investment vehicles never available before to the retail consumer: they daily leverage financial planners, social trading platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges and launchpads, and more. Meanwhile, social research shows that when it comes to financial sophistication, Generation Z adults surpassed even Millennials.

At the same time, younger generations do not trust governments and pension funds to support them. Many Millennials entered the workforce around the time of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007-2008, and for the Generation Z, it happened right before the pandemic. This experience led them to rely on personal savings and investments much more heavily than their predecessors. Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies' 21st annual retirement survey showed that 82% of Millennials are saving for retirement, starting at a median age of 25, five years earlier than Generation X and ten years earlier than Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, these numbers for Generation Z are unprecedented: the survey included only working adults, and even though their age was between 18 and 23 years old, 70% of them had already started saving for retirement at a median age of 19.

The need for financial independence requires a new level of financial literacy, new tools and new concepts. So it is no wonder that movements like FIRE and various sources of passive income are growing in popularity by the day. Naturally, emerging financial technologies, and first and foremost cryptocurrencies, hold particular appeal.

According to The 2022 Investopedia Financial Literacy Survey, cryptocurrency is the most popular type of investment among the US Millennials (38% have crypto investments and 37% have investments in stock) and second popular among Gen Z adults (26% have investments in stock and 23% have crypto investments.)