How the world invests

Everyone in the world has the potential to be an investor. 

Up until about four weeks ago — with the launch of our new global investing platform*   — investing in the world’s public markets was cumbersome, complex, and too expensive for most everyday investors. 

Now, by leveraging the global reach and the permissionless nature of the Bitcoin blockchain, investment opportunities are now literally at the fingertips of billions of people in the form of an easy-to-use app. 

After talking to thousands of Abra users all over the world over the last several weeks and months, these are the barriers that people are facing when trying to make investments:

Access: Traditionally, investing opportunities have not been universally available around the world. With Abra, investing is now location-independent, which opens up a world of opportunity for people interested in preserving and building wealth over time.

Affordability: For many investors (or would-be investors) one of the main barriers to entry is the cost of the initial investment coupled with traditional brokerage fees — that made investing feel too far out of reach. Since Abra is building on the Bitcoin blockchain, fractional investing is possible, meaning shares of valuable stocks and be subdivided into smaller portions. Not only does this provide an easier entry point for investors, but it also helps support long-term investing tactics like dollar-cost averaging. Currently, there is only a $5 minimum on Abra and there is $0 on stock and ETF investing through 2019.

Security: Abra users control their private keys to their Abra wallet, which means they are in control. This is fundamentally different than any other kind of investing service offering any kind of exposure to traditional stocks and ETFs.

Meeting worldwide demand: What the data says

In an effort to show the impact of Abra’s financial innovations, and to show how the lofty idea of decentralized finance actually works on the ground, (and because worldwide investing trends are really interesting) we will be publishing the Global Investor Insights on a quarterly basis. 

These early trends are based on insights from 12,000 Abra equity wallets and show us f how the world wants to invest.

Key findings include:

• So far, investors in 154 countries have created an equity wallet, and investors are already active in 82 of those countries.  
• The median total investment per user is $49.18 and the median investment per asset is $24.65. 
• The most popular stock, worldwide, on the Abra app is Tesla ($TSLA) including heavy investment from people in South Africa, France, Argentia, Austria, and the Philippines.
• Global investors are interested in tech companies. In addition to Tesla, investors are getting exposure to Amazon, Apple, Google, Alibaba, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, and Netflix. 

Abra’s first full Global Investor Insights will be available at abra.com/research.