It is my speculation that when most people talk about retail investors, they may loosely be referring to a much larger market which traditionally speaking, are not investors in any form whatsoever.
Judging from various data points, ChatGPT estimates that retail investors are 12-15% of the world's population and based on public data on world population, which estimates that the world has 8.062 billion people in it, retail investors count up to 967.44 million — 1.209 billion.
Certainly it makes sense now why there's often the emphasis on onboarding the next 1 billion, however, it's still evident that we've been looking at and building for the wrong market.
How?
According to a Triple A report, over 560 million people are estimated to be crypto investors. Most people understand that high and ultra high net-worth individuals are not heavily invested in crypto, and institutions only just openly made an entry, so this much investors certainly come from the market segment everyone keeps talking about.
Retail investors are already here, they've always been here and there's proof of this everywhere.
For one, the memecoin boom is a tell because retail players are mostly gamblers looking for quick profits, they are mostly never betting on the long-term hence why perpetual markets are actively seeing billions in volume.
Certainly, some of these numbers can be overstated with heavy MMs manipulations but in many cases, these numbers can also be understated to hide the extent of damage to investors, which are mostly retail.
Why damage?
As much as 80% of retail investors actively lose money because they actively try to trade short-term market movements. This is why it's relatively easy for market markets to exploit them. The financial markets are generally not set up for short-term betters to make sustainable profits and there are recent reports that show that retail investors are beginning to understand this, when it comes to the cryptocurrency markets at least.
Despite the widespread belief that retail investors have exited the cryptocurrency space, that’s not the case. According to Vugar Usi Zade, chief operating officer of Bitget, they’ve simply changed their approach.
In an interview with Cointelegraph at the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada, Usi Zade explained that retail trading has shifted away from rampant speculation and toward more practical and sustainable use cases.
He attributes this change, in part, to lingering PTSD from the last crypto market cycle, as well as broader macroeconomic uncertainty fueled by the Trump administration, which has placed downward pressure on risk assets throughout 2025.
“Retail investors’ appetite for risk is much lower because we know what happened with the stock market and every other aspect,” Usi Zade said. “There’s less disposable income to play around with, but people are becoming smarter with their investments.” — Cointelegraph report
Building for consumers is the way to go
As much as 70-80% of the world are non-investors and a chunk of them are popularly called the unbanked.
In most countries where this market accounts for a huge percentage of the entire population, these individuals make up the informal sector which contributes a lot of value to the general economy.
Generally speaking, these are the consumers. This is at least a $2 trillion market in pure revenue for businesses. This isn't about income held in accounts, savings, assets or any of that, because these people generally only consume everything that comes through, so this is all money moving through several economies annually as revenue.
We've talked about retail for so long, mostly because of our personal greed of wanting numbers to go up so we can dump on said retail and expect that they return at some point to get dumped on again.
It's sort of comical because most of everyone that talks about retail coming is a retail investor themselves, just deluded to think otherwise.
Notwithstanding, we have to shift our attention to the much larger market, the consumers, which generally includes retail investors. This is why the focus on things like decentralized payments is so important.
Our ecosystem needs to take on a new shape in order to grow into what's needed to truly get this technology and its vast array of solutions to the masses.
Retail investors out, general consumers in. This is the way.