Every generation has its own wealth code.
In the 1970s, as the thunder of reform and opening up just began to roar, the wealth code was written in the factories of township enterprises and on the construction blueprints of Shenzhen's Shekou. Daring to venture into business and buying properties in prime locations were the most certain paths of that era.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when the first email was sent from China and when Yinghaiwei's "space-time tunnel" opened, the wealth code was written in the ".com" suffix and in the sleepless lights of Zhongguancun. Buying stocks of Tencent and Alibaba, and diving into the internet wave, were the most thrilling choices of that time.
So, as we arrive in 2026, with Generation Z and Generation Alpha stepping onto the historical stage, where is their wealth code written?
The answer might lie in the lifestyle of this generation. To know what will be most valuable a decade from now, go see where today's young people are truly pouring their passion and talent.
This leads us to today's story. A story about the evolution of a generation's concept of wealth and the answer to the commercial world of the next decade.
And the protagonist of our story today is Roblox. It looks like a children's playground, but it is becoming the social university where this generation of young people learns business, practices finance, and earns their first bucket of gold.
Finance Lessons for a 13-Year-Old
Let's forget the "metaverse" narrative—once overhyped and now considered dead by everyone—and look at the stories unfolding on Roblox.
Alex Hicks first encountered Roblox at the age of 13. Like other kids, he played games and made friends there. But soon, he found that the platform's biggest attraction for him wasn't playing, but creating. A year later, at 14, he began trying to use Roblox tools to make his first game. He kept at it for ten years.
During this decade, he never worked a day at a game company, nor did he receive any formal programming training. Inside Roblox, he learned how to design game mechanics, how to price virtual items, how to maintain user engagement through updates, and even how to manage a development team. By 2020, at just 24 years old, he owned an independent game studio called RedManta, with annual revenues exceeding $1 million.
Hicks' story is not unique. Alex Balfanz, 18, before entering Duke University, co-developed a game called "Jailbreak" (cops and robbers). Within months of its release, the game earned him enough for his $300,000 tuition, and two years later, he became a millionaire.
Behind these stories is Roblox becoming the most important financial启蒙 (enlightenment) classroom for this generation of young people. Through direct business practice, it allows tens of millions of teenagers to understand for the first time what income, expenses, profit, and return on investment are.
Here, a massive creator economy is rising at an unprecedented speed. According to Roblox's Annual Economic Impact Report released in September 2025, from March 2024 to March 2025, the platform paid creators over $1 billion in earnings, a year-on-year increase of more than 31%. The top 1,000 creators earned an average of around $1 million annually per person, showing significant growth.
Of course, any mature business ecosystem relies on a large denominator. Data shows that over 99% of creators earn less than $1,000 per year. But this恰恰 (precisely) constitutes a real, even somewhat残酷 (cruel), business competitive environment. The first lesson children learn here might be the 80/20 rule of a market economy.
For this generation, their first finance启蒙 (enlightenment) lesson doesn't come from parents or school, but from Roblox. Their first earned money, the first business model they learn, even their first business failure experienced here, will be deeply imprinted on their cognition.
This raises an anxiety-inducing question for all traditional financial institutions: When this generation grows up, when their financial启蒙 (enlightenment) education is completed in a virtual game world, what should we banks, still queuing up in the real world, do?
Banks Forced to Join the Game
The managers at Canada's TD Bank clearly also saw this unsettling future. In March 2025, one of North America's largest banks officially released a financial education game called "Treat Island Tycoon" on Roblox.
In this game, players扮演 (play the role of) a young entrepreneur building their own ice cream empire on a virtual island. They need to earn money, decide how to spend it, and learn about saving and borrowing. The game is completely free, purely for educational purposes.
TD Bank's decision was based on detailed research: a high 86% of parents believe interactive games or animated videos are far more effective than traditional books in teaching financial knowledge.
TD Bank's VP, Emily Ross, stated in an interview: "Virtual experiences are reshaping the form of early education. What we need to do is provide a safe and fun entry point, allowing children to complete their financial启蒙 (enlightenment) subtly, laying the foundation for their future wealth life."
Translating this PR speak: We must go to where this generation of children is, not wait for them to come to us.
Where users' time is, there lies the entry point to wealth. When Roblox's daily active users exceed 150 million, covering a wide age range from children to young adults, it is no longer just a gaming platform, but the心智 (mindshare) battlefield for the next generation of financial users.
TD Bank's anxiety is a microcosm of the entire traditional financial industry. Moreover, their competitors are no longer just other banks. Around the same time TD launched its game, US fintech company Chime partnered with cosmetics brand e.l.f. Beauty to launch another financial education game on Roblox.
A cosmetics brand is crossing boundaries to seize the entry point of financial education. This means the boundaries of financial services are being completely broken down, and the starting point of the competition has moved forward to 10-year-old children.
Traditional banks once thought their moats were physical branches, licenses, and strong capital. But now they find the real moat might just be user mindshare. And user mindshare is shaped during adolescence.
When a child gets used to managing their assets, trading, and investing in a virtual world, how much need will they have for a physical bank when they grow up? When their first income comes from selling a virtual item they designed, not from parental New Year's money, how will their definition of assets change?
This touches on a deeper issue: When the scene of financial启蒙 (enlightenment) shifts from bank halls to game worlds, we will face a group of digital natives with completely different concepts of wealth. How will they reshape the future financial world?
When Virtual Assets Become the "First"
To understand the coming changes, we must first clarify a core difference: this generation of young people and their parents have undergone a fundamental qualitative change in their relationship with virtual assets.
Many would say trading game items isn't new; Roblox didn't invent it. Indeed, Gen X and Millennials also traded gold in "World of Warcraft" and bought/sold equipment in "Fantasy Westward Journey." But the virtual asset trading back then is fundamentally different from the phenomenon we see today.
During the heyday of "World of Warcraft," Blizzard officially prohibited any form of cash交易 (transactions) and would mercilessly ban accounts of gold farming studios; players would even自发 (voluntarily) hunt them down. Virtual asset trading was an underground black market suppressed by the official.
On Roblox, this is a sunlit path paved by the official. You create content, players消费 (consume) Robux to buy it, and then you exchange this virtual currency for real US dollars through DevEx (Developer Exchange program). This is the platform's core, most encouraged business model. Roblox's CEO甚至 (even) proudly announces on earnings calls how many billions were paid to creators that year.
Gamers' definition of assets has also巨大地 (greatly) changed with the development of virtual worlds and games. In CS:GO, someone offered $1.5 million for a rare weapon, and the owner refused,嫌 (deeming) the offer too low. The entire CS:GO skin market is now worth a whopping $5.8 billion,俨然 (just like) a massive independent economy.
Players analyze skin price trends like stocks, even employing tactics like market manipulation and short selling. A single game update once caused the market's value to蒸发 (evaporate) by over $2 billion in a short time, as惨烈 (brutal) as a small financial crisis.
While Gen X is still teaching kids how to save money, Gen Z has already learned market manipulation in CS:GO. This difference is shaping two generations'截然不同 (completely different) financial worldviews.
A 2025 survey showed that among US Gen Z, 51% have owned or currently own cryptocurrency, and a high 45%希望 (wish) to receive crypto as Christmas gifts. Meanwhile, the proportion of Gen Z with traditional bank accounts fell below 50%.
For them, the change in a digital wallet, skins in CS:GO, Robux in Roblox, and deposits in a bank account have no essential difference. They are all numbers, usable for payment, transaction, and investment.
Virtual and real have long been not so泾渭分明 (sharply divided) in their eyes.
A Roblox report from late 2025 showed that a high 70% of Gen Z users stated that their avatar's clothing on the platform even directly influences their shopping decisions and style preferences in the real world. Virtual world aesthetics are also spilling over into the real world.
Virtual assets are becoming real because the definition of "real" itself is being rewritten by this generation.
The Unseen Inertia
Why does every generation's wealth ultimately heavily invest in the fields most familiar to them in their youth? This is no coincidence; behind it are three invisible hands laying out the pieces.
The first hand is Cognitive Lock-in.
The legendary investor Peter Lynch proposed a famous investment principle: "Invest in what you know." The underlying logic is that people are naturally inclined to make decisions and investments in the fields they know best, as familiarity brings security and reduces uncertainty.
For Gen X, the houses they could see and touch were the most certain assets. For Millennials, the internet products they used daily were the most credible investment targets.
For Gen Z, the time they spend in virtual worlds甚至 (even) exceeds that in the physical world. Those tradable,炫耀-worthy (show-off worthy), socially valuable virtual props are, to them, as real and certain as a property was in their parents' eyes.
This cognition, rooted in their upbringing, once formed, is hard to change. It will continue to guide their wealth flow for decades to come.
The second hand is the Intergenerational Transfer of Trust.
Gen X's trust was built on the state and land; a red "Real Estate Certificate" was the ultimate source of their security. Millennials' trust began shifting towards商业组织 (business organizations) and legal contracts; an stock option agreement with a company logo represented a share in a business's future value.
For Gen Z, the cornerstone of trust is shifting from authoritative institutions to virtual network consensus.
They trust code, trust algorithms, trust scarcity recognized by millions of players worldwide. A hash value recorded on a blockchain, or a skin with extremely low availability on CS:GO's global servers, in their eyes, its credibility甚至 (even) exceeds a wealth management product说明书 (brochure) issued by a bank.
The third hand is the Self-Fulfillment of Network Effects.
When a generation collectively focuses its attention, time, and money on an emerging field, it creates powerful network effects. The more people participate, the higher the value of this field; the higher the value, the more talent and capital it attracts, forming a positive feedback loop that ultimately self-fulfills into the next era's wealth trend.
The golden twenty years of real estate, the entrepreneurial wave of the internet, all followed this path. Now, hundreds of millions of young people are building new social networks, new economic systems, and new cultural identities in virtual worlds. This force,汇聚 (converging) from collective consensus, is laying the most solid foundation for the value of digital assets.
Understanding these three规律 (laws/rules), we can truly see why some US stock traders, even after the metaverse bubble burst, still believe Roblox is severely undervalued. Because in their eyes, Roblox is no longer a simple game company, but an entry point to the future world of wealth, driven by cognitive lock-in, trust transfer, and network effects.
The Mislabeled Company
For a long time, people have been accustomed to measuring Roblox by the standards of a game company, comparing it to traditional gaming giants like Activision Blizzard and EA.
However, using the ruler of a game company cannot measure the value of a financial infrastructure. Roblox's core business model is not making and selling games, but providing a complete, closed-loop economic system. In this system, it plays four key roles:
First, it is the Creator of the World. It provides the underlying physics engine, development tools, and servers, allowing creators to build their virtual worlds like playing with LEGO, at low cost.
Second, it is the Central Bank. It issues and manages the world's sole universal currency, Robux. It determines the issuance volume of Robux, the inflation rate, and most importantly, the exchange rate between Robux and real-world currency (USD).
Third, it is the Tax Bureau and Payment Gateway. For every transaction occurring on the platform, whether a user buys a virtual item or a developer cashes out Robux, Roblox takes a cut. It processes hundreds of millions of micro-transactions daily, highly similar to Alipay or WeChat Pay.
Fourth, it is the Market Regulator. It审核 (reviews) all content on the platform, combats fraud and illegal activities, and maintains the stability and fairness of the entire economic system.
These four roles combined constitute a typical platform economy. It doesn't directly produce goods (games) but profits by setting rules, providing services, and collecting taxes. This business logic is identical to platforms like Alibaba and Amazon.
From this perspective, Roblox paying creators over $1 billion in 2025 takes on a completely different meaning. This is no longer a "game company's cost" but the "disposable income of residents" in a massive economy. And the total economic activity generated on the platform is more like a country's GDP.
Yet, why is such a massive economy still reporting losses? This is precisely the root of the market's confusion about it and the core reason for its undervaluation.
Roblox's losses are structural, actively chosen losses. Its revenue cost structure is completely different from traditional companies. For every $1 spent, about 49 cents flow out before Roblox can recognize it as revenue—22% paid to app stores like Apple and Google as渠道费 (channel fees), and another 27% paid directly to creators. The remaining money must also cover server, R&D, management, and other costs.
This model is unacceptable to investors seeking short-term profits. But if compared to early-stage Alipay, it becomes easy to understand.
Alipay was also hugely loss-making for many years in its early days. Because it bore all the infrastructure construction costs and user education costs, using massive subsidies to cultivate a generation's habit of mobile支付 (payment). When everyone got used to扫码支付 (scan-to-pay), when it became an indispensable infrastructure for the entire commercial society, its trillions in value were truly realized.
Of course, there are essential differences between Roblox and Alipay. The former is rooted in entertainment scenarios, the latter solves a payment刚性需求 (rigid demand). But they are strikingly similar in the strategic logic of using losses to换取 (exchange for) intergenerational habits.
The receding tide of the metaverse is actually good for Roblox. It washed away the speculative foam, stopped people from confusing it with those空洞的概念 (hollow concepts), and gave them a chance to see its true value: a financial infrastructure rooted in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of young people, possessing powerful network effects and a closed-loop economic system.
The Answer for the Next Decade
An era's financial education is shifting from the physical world to the digital world.
When a generation's financial启蒙 (enlightenment) begins with business practice in a virtual world; when their first asset is a tradable game skin; when their trust in digital wallets exceeds their dependence on physical banks, a全新的经济范式 (new economic paradigm) has already begun.
How we understand platforms like Roblox today will determine how we understand the commercial changes of the next decade. When a company's users are simultaneously its consumers, producers, promoters, and investors, are traditional valuation models still valid? When a company's core product is not a commodity, but a set of economic rules and a circulating currency, how should we define its boundaries?
The answers to these questions cannot be found in today's financial statements. But the hundreds of millions of young people creating, trading, and socializing in virtual worlds are converging into a powerful force reshaping the future commercial landscape.
Historical experience has repeatedly proven that understanding what young people define as assets means understanding the future flow of wealth.
Every generation's wealth code is written in every new consensus reached collectively by that generation.
