Morgan Stanley Executive on Bitcoin: ‘We Are Still So Early on This Journey’

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Morgan Stanley launched its bitcoin exchange-traded product, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), into a market it believes is still in its infancy. At a panel on Wednesday moderated by Tyler Evans, Amy Oldenburg, the bank’s head of digital assets, spent the better part of an hour making a case for bitcoin that few clients have heard in full, and said that gap is the industry’s most urgent problem. “We have to start with bitcoin,” Oldenburg told the audience, citing the asset’s roughly 1.5 trillion dollar market cap and its distance from the rest of the crypto landscape. She was careful to draw a line between bitcoin and crypto as a broad category, a distinction she said most retail and institutional clients still do not make with confidence. The firm wants to see that distinction anchored in fundamental research, not just narrative. Oldenburg: Bitcoin has an education problem The education problem, she said, runs deep. Many investors still associate bitcoin with its early history of use by bad actors, and struggle to see past that frame when weighing an allocation. Oldenburg said that when clients ask about yield or structured exposure, her team tries to be direct: “you can present it as a yield, but the underlying asset is bitcoin.” That clarity, she said, is still missing from most conversations in the market, and there is “so much more work to do.” MSBT pulled in more than $100 million in its first week of trading, a strong early signal for a product the bank describes as designed for the full spectrum of its client base rather than a narrow segment. But Oldenburg was quick to put that number in context. All of the initial flows came through self-directed accounts, because the fund had not yet been made available on the advisory platform. She noted that the bank has announced a 2–4% crypto allocation recommendation, and that even with that guidance in place, take-up through advisors has been slow. The product, she reminded the audience, has been on the market for less than a year. To bridge that gap, Morgan Stanley is working from the inside out. Oldenburg said the firm is rolling out internal training so that financial advisors can speak to clients on bitcoin with confidence, and that her team spends “hour after hour after hour” on the phone walking clients through models and allocation frameworks. She said the bank designs products for clients with different needs and wants its platform to cover each of those needs, including clients who want a direct ETP wrapper, and that spot crypto trading is coming for those on the wealth management side. On custodians, Oldenburg acknowledged the complexity of the decision. The market has no shortage of providers, and choosing among them was not straightforward, which led the firm to work with more than one. Morgan Stanley ultimately tapped Coinbase and BNY Mellon as custodians for MSBT. When the conversation turned to high-beta bitcoin plays, Oldenburg called Strategy, the Michael Saylor-led company formerly known as MicroStrategy, “a good friend of Morgan Stanley,” and said the bank has worked alongside it through its evolution. She said most of the exposure in that vehicle so far is coming from retail and that “digital credit” as a category will take time to develop. Morgan Stanley buying bitcoin is “not out of the question” On the question of banks holding bitcoin on their balance sheets, Oldenburg said it is “not out of the question” if regulatory progress continues, but was measured in framing it. The U.S. needs greater alignment among its financial regulators, she said, and for a global firm like Morgan Stanley, the picture is more complex still — each jurisdiction comes with its own framework. She closed where she began: on the need for research with reach. The market has commentators and personalities that investors trust and follow, she said, and the work ahead is to bring that kind of accessible, grounded analysis into the mainstream. “We are still so early on this journey,” she said. “So little allocation. It’s still really early.”

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