Morgan Stanley Says Crypto ETF Adoption Is Still Early – Advisors Have Not Caught Up to Retail Yet

Morgan Stanley’s Head of Digital Asset Strategy told the DC Blockchain Summit on March 17 that crypto ETF activity on the firm’s platform remains dominated by self-directed investors, with advisor-managed adoption still in early development.

The 80% Problem

Amy Oldenburg put a specific number on the gap. Roughly 80% of crypto ETF activity on Morgan Stanley’s platform currently comes from self-directed investors. Financial advisors are still working through how digital assets fit into traditional managed portfolio construction. That split reflects an industry-wide pattern, not a Morgan Stanley-specific one.

According to report by The Block, the managed money transition has been slower than the raw inflow figures suggest. Spot crypto products have attracted more than $68 billion in inflows since 2024. Major brokerage networks did not fully open these products to advisor-managed accounts until late 2025. The capital moved in. The advisory infrastructure took longer to follow.

How Morgan Stanley Is Guiding Advisors

The firm has begun publishing specific allocation ranges to move the process forward. Oldenburg cited 2% as the suggested figure for balanced growth portfolios and up to 4% for opportunistic growth mandates. Those ranges give advisors a defensible starting point without requiring them to build crypto allocation frameworks from scratch.

Oldenburg described the broader rollout as a managed journey. The language is deliberate. Advisor education and portfolio construction questions are the bottleneck, not client demand or regulatory access.

The Proprietary Product Push

Morgan Stanley’s institutional positioning has accelerated sharply in 2026. The bank filed with the SEC on January 6 to launch its own Bitcoin Trust and Solana Trust. A follow-on filing the next day introduced an Ethereum Trust structured to distribute staking rewards directly to investors.

The firm is also working to enable direct crypto trading for E*Trade’s 5.2 million users, extending its reach well beyond institutional and high-net-worth channels.

That combination of proprietary trusts, staking-enabled products, and retail brokerage integration represents a more complete crypto stack than most traditional financial institutions have assembled. The advisor adoption curve is the remaining variable. Oldenburg’s comments suggest Morgan Stanley is treating that as an education and tooling problem, not a demand problem.

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