Baby boomers are the fastest-growing demographic in crypto, with their numbers doubling in the space of a year, according to a survey by Australian exchange CoinSpot.
The total percentage of crypto investors over 60 remains relatively low — around 4.4% — but with their large retirement nest eggs and a lifetime’s worth of savings, boomers have an outsized impact on markets.
Former ANZ banker and payments consultant Rod Tasker, himself a baby boomer, says active crypto investors in his age bracket tend to be highly financially literate.
“Even if the number is fairly low, the amount of money invested is quite likely to be higher than other demographics,” he explains.
“A lot of them are quite sophisticated, they’ve already got their investment portfolios. They might have the investment property, the share portfolio, depending on risk appetite they might have got into options,” he says.
But at the other end of the scale, he says that baby boomers who grew up in a more trusting and less connected world often end up as targets of crypto scammers for their wealth.
“The baby boomer demographic does have people who are very vulnerable to that scamming for all sorts of reasons, ranging from dementia through to being brought up in a more sheltered world.”
According to the Pew Research Centre, baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. Though pretty much anyone over 50 in crypto stands a good chance of being labelled a boomer. In the US, boomers hold around $79 trillion in assets, according to the Federal Reserve.
Boomer gets scammed by Australian ‘prime minister’
Mike is an 80-year old former mortgage broker who became interested in a crypto investment opportunity after watching Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese interviewed about the scheme on current affairs panel show The Project.
“He had this Bitcoin investment program, which was definitely safe, and it was fantastic,” says Mike. “They were doing a buy low and sell high regularly and had this little algorithm that made it work.”
Unfortunately, the footage was a deepfake cooked up by AI that connected Mike to a crypto scam website, where a lovely chap from customer service encouraged him to send through a small initial investment of a few hundred euros.
When the site quickly began pestering him to send 10,000 euros, he started to realize something fishy was going on.
“It just seemed so genuine,” he says. “It appeared like he was talking.”
The experience made Mike extremely skeptical of Bitcoin. His unease only increased after a friend who’d bought four Bitcoin for a few hundred dollars almost a decade ago tried to cash them in online and was fleeced out of $400,000.
“She discovered that the cryptocurrency had been cashed, but the money was cashed for someone else,” he says. “She was very upset.”
Boomers are warming up to Bitcoin… slowly
All too common stories like this have given crypto a bad reputation among baby boomers. Crypto adoption among boomers is far lower than among 50- to 59-year-olds (12.2% of whom are investors) and the 20.7% adoption rate of the general population, according to CoinSpot’s April survey.
But Tim Wilks, chief business development officer for CoinSpot, says there are signs boomers are warming up to crypto. The survey found 38.5% of Australians aged 60+ reported being open to investing in crypto in the future and do not reject it outright, which is virtually identical to the national average (37.8%).
“While the adoption curve for older Australians remains steeper than for younger cohorts, interest and adoption are both still growing,” he says. “The boomer generation is no longer dismissing crypto out of hand, and many are asking serious questions and weighing it as part of their retirement strategy.”
Investors over 60 who manage their own retirement funds are twice as likely to hold crypto (6.2%) than those who don’t (3.2%).
Another Australian exchange, Independent Reserve, found higher rates of crypto ownership among boomers than CoinSpot, with ownership among the 65+ age group tripling to 6% between 2019 and 2024. Among investors aged 55-64, ownership doubled to 16%.
However, IR also found that a majority of those over 65 (52.4%) either have no opinion (31.8%) or consider crypto to be a scam (20.6%).
In the US, data from Blockchain Statistics and Demandsage suggest that baby boomers make up 10% of crypto owners. In the UK, EY’s Wealth Report found that around 15% of boomers are looking to diversify their portfolios into alternative assets like Bitcoin.
Simon’s…
cointelegraph.com