The New Wave of Retail Investors Wants More Than ETFs — And Why Decentralized AI Could Be Their Next Frontier
Gregory Cowles
Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder
This Post is Disseminated on behalf of Intellistake Technologies Corp.
A New Generation, A Different Playbook
A decade ago, the typical new investor might have bought an S&P 500 ETF, tucked it away, and checked in once a year. That strategy built wealth for millions of people. But the next generation isn’t following the same script.
Fidelity data shows that 43% of new investors hold crypto, compared with just 19% in ETFs. That inversion would have been almost unthinkable for ours or our parents’ generation, when ETFs symbolized cutting-edge access. Today, the story is flipped: ETFs represent the safe middle ground, while younger investors lean toward digital assets for their exposure to growth.
The World Economic Forum reports that 30% of Gen Z investors begin while still at university, compared with just 15% of millennials and 5% of boomers at the same age. They rebalance monthly. They use AI-powered tools. They test strategies on social media cues. It’s messy, sometimes reckless — but it’s fast. Nearly half admit to regretting decisions influenced by online hype. And yet, they keep moving, adjusting, learning and repositioning.
What I take from this is not just that Gen Z is “different.” It’s that their relationship with markets is more experimental and direct. They’re less interested in handing money to a manager and waiting for quarterly updates. They want to plug in themselves, to the infrastructure if possible, they want to understand it.
And that’s why I believe the flow of money from this generation may be heading fast toward decentralized technologies — because those are the ones that can offer ownership of the scaffolding, and involvement in the build, not just the view from the finished tower.
Decentralized AI: The Emerging Infrastructure
Artificial intelligence is the story of the decade. But while headlines are dominated by Nvidia stock 65x’ing and Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, there’s another layer emerging — decentralized AI.
Projects like the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance and their FET token are designed to build AI infrastructure in an open, distributed way. The Alliance — a merger of Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol — is one of the largest decentralized collaborations in the world. Its ambition is not just to create better chatbots, but to lay the groundwork for artificial general intelligence. AGI, if realized, could prove far more transformative for enterprises than today’s large language models. It could coordinate logistics, manage supply chains, optimize energy grids. In other words: real economic activity, not just better autocomplete.
Market signals suggest this is more than a niche pursuit. Tokens associated with the Alliance command multi-billion-dollar market capitalization. Developer activity is increasing. Enterprises are beginning pilots. These aren’t guarantees of future returns — but they are indications that capital and talent are flowing into this space.
Then there is Bittensor, which has taken a different but complementary approach. It operates as a decentralized marketplace for intelligence, rewarding contributors who train and validate AI models. The idea is simple: rather than one corporation owning the model, the network collectively builds and verifies it, with incentives distributed through its native token, TAO. Over the past two years, Bittensor’s market cap has grown into the billions, supported by an expanding community of participants and developers.
I don’t raise these examples to promote any single company. I raise them because they illustrate momentum. Decentralized AI may no longer be theoretical. It is beginning to function as infrastructure — networks running, incentives distributing, communities scaling. For investors, that matters. It suggests that the frontier is not limited to Silicon Valley giants but could also be shaped by open, participatory systems.
And that is the kind of opportunity younger investors may instinctively gravitate toward: one where the upside feels unbounded, the participation feels direct, and the timing feels urgent.
Intellistake: Lowering the Barriers to Participation
Here lies the problem. Direct participation in decentralized AI is still technically daunting. To engage today requires wallets, private keys, validator delegation, staking parameters, governance votes. Even for those of us who live in this space daily, it’s complex. For the average investor, it’s a barrier high enough to keep them out entirely.
That’s the gap Intellistake is built to address. We aim to be the entry point for investors who want exposure to decentralized AI growth without needing a computer science degree or a multi-step wallet setup. Through a publicly listed vehicle, investors can participate in this frontier with the accessibility of traditional markets.
Think of it this way: investing directly in decentralized AI today is like wiring up your own home to a power grid under construction. Possible, yes, but full of risks and technical hurdles. Intellistake is designed to be more like a utility provider — handling the complexity, managing the infrastructure, ensuring compliance, and delivering access in a way that doesn’t require rewiring your life.
We’re building directly on the networks described earlier. Our validator operations secure decentralized AI protocols. Our enterprise platform, Intelliscope, is under current testing and development to bring compliant AI agents to real businesses. These two layers — infrastructure and application — mean investors may gain exposure not just to token speculation but to the economic activity of networks and enterprises using them.
We don’t claim this is risk-free. Markets fluctuate. Regulatory frameworks evolve. Technologies shift. But unlike speculative bets, decentralized AI infrastructure already performs essential roles: validators secure consensus, enterprises need compliant AI, yields flow from real network participation. These are functions, not fantasies.
For investors, Intellistake may serve as a proxy for early participation in decentralized AI. Not a guarantee of returns, but a bridge into a sector that has otherwise been difficult to reach.
Closing Thoughts
The story of ETFs was about packaging access. The story of decentralized AI may be about unbundling it. For younger investors, who already allocate more to crypto than to ETFs, the direction of travel seems clear. They don’t want to buy the tollbooth after the bridge is built. They want to help fund the scaffolding — and benefit from its completion.
That doesn’t mean abandoning caution. Retail investors have made mistakes in every cycle, and this will be no different. But when I look at the surveys, the market data, the cultural sentiment, the pattern is hard to ignore: younger generations are aligning their capital with technologies that feel like the future, not the past.
At Intellistake, our role is not to replace their curiosity but to channel it. To make the frontier accessible without the technical friction. To provide a regulated, transparent gateway into an industry that could, if it scales as experts predict, reshape both AI and investment itself.
Because in the end, the decision seems simple: would you want to own part of the port while the ships are still being built, or pay the freight once trade is already potentially booming..?
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