Which Young Men Are "All In" On Crypto?

If young people are over-leveraged on crypto, policymakers and employers can make better options available

The most recent Young Men Research Project (YMRP) survey, fielded October 15 to 29, found that young men (and it is mostly men) continue to invest in crypto.

The topline result suggests that most young people are actively saving, with about three in four (73%) young men and 83 percent of women aged 18-29 actively contributing to a savings account. At the same time, more young men own individual stocks than have a 401(k) or IRA, with about 26 percent saying they own crypto, 24 percent owning individual stocks, and 21 percent contributing to a 401(k) or IRA. In short, young men are saving and investing in a wide variety of financial products.

About 20 percent of young women report saving through a 401(k) or IRA, similar to men, but are about half as likely to own crypto or individual stocks (13 percent and 12 percent, respectively). While reliable estimates of crypto ownership among young people are hard to come by, the endnote shows our broader asset ownership closely matches recent Census data.

Not surprisingly, employment status matters immensely: Young men still in school are less likely to own either crypto or retirement assets (15 percent own crypto; just 10 percent have retirement accounts). Across employment circumstances, personal wealth plays a clear role as well: higher-income full-time workers, part-time workers, and wealthier students are more likely to have both crypto and more traditional investments than their lower-income peers.

Very few young men are truly “all in” on crypto.

Only about 6 percent say they exclusively invest in crypto, without savings or retirement accounts. This is a small and statistically peculiar bunch. They are slightly more likely to be either fully employed but earning relatively little—about 9 percent of full-time employed young men earning less than $30k/year are “all in” on crypto by this definition—or to be currently unemployed but have had a good job within the past year. Roughly 14 percent of currently unemployed young men who earned over $100,000 in the past year are “all in” on crypto.

In other words, while unemployed young men are more likely to be all in on crypto (11 percent versus 6 percent overall), the group is disproportionately made up of recently higher-income young men. About 15 percent of those who earned more than $100,000 in the past year qualify as “all in,” suggesting this is often a story of lost access rather than reckless choice.

This “all in on crypto” population consists largely of young men whose jobs never offered diversified financial options, and young men who used to have access to these options but lost them. Digging deeper into such a small group pushes the limits of statistical propriety, but the evidence suggests that this “all in” crowd is not foolishly eschewing safer options. In many cases, these options are simply unavailable.

This remains true even looking at those who, regardless of other assets, hold crypto but not a 401(k). About 19 percent of young men have at least crypto, among other investments, but not a 401(k). Among them, about two-thirds are actively contributing to a savings account, 40 percent of them own individual stocks, 10 percent have mutual funds, and 8 percent of them have a mortgage. Significantly more of these young men are high-income (26 percent of young men earning over $100k/year fall into this category). They’re much more likely to be employed—full-time or part-time—than unemployed or still in school. And while sample size considerations constrain our confidence in this conclusion, the data continue to suggest the “crypto yes, 401(k) no” young men are a combination of lower-income full-time employed and higher-income part-time employed: the two categories of employment that are less likely to provide employees with a 401(k).

There is virtually no equivalent of the “all in on crypto” group among young women. In total, barely 1 percent of women aged 18-29 meet this definition. Half as many young women are in the “crypto yes, 401(k) no” category as young men, at 10 percent versus 19 percent. It’s hard to draw conclusions with great statistical confidence, as our sample of young women (at n=318) is considerably smaller than our sample of young men (at n=1,000), but the trends look similar. The “crypto yes, 401(k) no” women are more likely to be part-time employed (17 percent) than unemployed (6 percent) or full-time employed (12 percent). About 20 percent of young women earning over $100k/year are in the “crypto yes, 401(k) no” category, compared to 10 percent of young women overall. There are significantly fewer women crypto investors than men, but their financial situations are generally comparable.

Among young men and young women, the primary crypto asset remains Bitcoin. About 16 percent of young men (and 53 percent of young men who own any crypto) say Bitcoin is their primary crypto asset, as do 7 percent of young women (and 49 percent of young women who own any crypto). Statistically negligible shares of either say they are primarily invested in assets like memecoins.

None of this is to minimize the risks in crypto.

Far from it: Bitcoin dipped about five percent in 2025, compared to a 17 percent gain in the S&P500. But our data suggests that young people are looking to diversify their assets, not concentrate them in crypto. When they have access to retirement accounts and other savings vehicles, they readily pursue them.

Policymakers must disabuse themselves of the notion that young people who put their money in crypto are deliberately ignoring better options. It appears to be the opposite: the all-in on crypto crowd evidently lack options, and are simply making investments where they’re able to do so. In a world where many employers no longer deign to help young employees build retirement savings, and where one can now “start buying crypto with as little as one dollar,” crypto concentration should be understood not as an act of political rebellion so much as one of economic survival. Lo and behold, when young people have more chances to diversify their wealth, they pursue them.

Some policymakers have taken note of this, namely, the Republicans who’ve touted the new “Trump Accounts” pilot program in which parents can set aside $1,000 for their newborn child’s retirement savings. Our polling found this is the single most popular policy Donald Trump currently has to offer young men:

Too often, the primary response on the left is to scold young people for making these sorts of investments in the first place. This mindset misses the motivations young people actually have for their financial decisions. Worse, it has left a clear opening for Republicans who are experimenting with new ways to appeal to the financial concerns of young people.

Our previous research in this area has shown that this domain should be a major weakness for Donald Trump. His corruption and ineptitude have cost his own supporters millions of dollars in shoddy crypto investments. Leading financial investigators have produced content, wildly popular among young men, exposing how Trump has “legalized scams” in the crypto sector.

But the reason many young people are in that sector in the first place is because they want to do something to grow their wealth—not because of some ideological predilection for digital libertarianism. Policymakers must urgently understand that if they won’t help young people prosper and build wealth, less reputable actors are waiting at every corner of the internet who recognize such an opportunity when they see it.

Endnote: We note that benchmarking the important question of what financial assets young people own against other sources is not a straightforward task. Authoritative studies such as Heckman et al. (2025) define the lower bound of “young” as age 35 and begin measurement there, and many studies that track the portfolios of young people only track high-net wealth individuals (or their total holdings). But according to the most recent available set of estimates from the U.S. Census, the 2023 “Wealth, Asset Ownership, & Debt of Households” estimates, our survey results closely match the Census for the subset of financial assets that both measure.

According to the Census estimate, 23.4 percent of Gen Z households invest in an IRA compared to 21 percent of men 18-29 and 20 percent of women in our study. The report estimates about 79.2 percent of Gen Z households have a savings account compared to 73 percent of men and 83 percent of women in our study. The Census estimated that 19.8 percent of “Gen Z households” currently owned at least some equity in their own home, compared to about 16 percent of men and 12 percent of women in our study who reported having a mortgage or an owned home. The report estimates that 18.9 percent of “Gen Z households” own “stocks and mutual funds” compared to 26 percent of young men and 15 percent of young women in our study who own either of “individual stocks” or “mutual funds,” or both.

Our study differs from this Census estimate in two major ways: Only 41 percent of the men in our sample said they owned an automobile, and only 21 percent said they had a 401(k), with the Census estimating 66.2 percent of Gen Z households had at least some “equity in an automobile,” and 45.7 percent of Gen Z households contributed to at least one 401(k). We note that among young men in our sample who are currently employed full-time, about 56 percent have some automobile equity and 37 percent say they are contributing to a 401(k).

While the sampling procedure for this study involved weighting targets that combined numbers from the Census, American Community Survey, Catalist voter targets, and elsewhere, our numbers concerning the financial assets of young men appear to match generally agreed consensus data closely, and where they differ, can likely be explained by comparing individual men aged 18-29 to the general composition of a “household” within the Census nomenclature.