What's happening: More consumers are going digital for obvious reasons -- the convenience, the safety of not carrying around wads of cash, and after COVID, because of sanitary concerns, says Jody Jonsson, portfolio manager at Capital Group.

And while the entirety of cash payments is impossible to track, we can see that digital payments have grown faster than overall consumption over the past decade, Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard, tells Axios.

By the numbers: For long-term trends, surveys by the Atlanta Fed determined that in 2019, paper currency was used in 26% of consumer payments by number, and 6% by value. That's down from 40%, and 14%, respectively, in 2012.