Morgan Stanley is unleashing 15,000 wealth advisors to sell Bitcoin ETFs

08/07/2024 22:17
Morgan Stanley is unleashing 15,000 wealth advisors to sell Bitcoin ETFs

Morgan Stanley is becoming the first major bank to allow its advisors to begin selling Bitcoin ETFs

After months of buildup, the first of America's largest banks is finally allowing wealth advisors to sell Bitcoin ETFs to clients.

On Wednesday, Morgan Stanley lifted the gate on letting its roughly 15,000 investment advisors sell Bitcoin ETFs to clients. With trillions of dollars in portfolio holdings among the largest banks now in play, action in the Bitcoin ETFs is sure to get interesting. As CNBC reported last week, Morgan Stanley advisors are now getting BlackRock's and Fidelity's products in front of clients.

According to Pantera Capital's Cosmo Jiang, the shot of the starting gun is largely flying under the radar.

"I think this has totally gone unnoticed by the market," Jiang told Coinage in a new interview. "The Bitcoin ETFs have drawn in quite a lot of flows year-to-date, but ... if you talk to the large issuers, they'll tell you they've only turned on call it 10 to 15% of their distribution."

Now, as Morgan Stanley becomes the first of the large banks to set their wealth management teams lose on clients, that distribution is set to rise, potentially opening Bitcoin up to trillions of dollars in portfolio holdings.

"That is where a lot of the capital exists," Jiang said about the large U.S. wirehouses. "So I think this unlocking is getting from 10 to 15 points of distribution to 100 points of distribution eventually and all these wirehouses [are] a huge piece of that and so them turning it on ... is a massive deal."

Last month at the Bitcoin Conference, Bloomberg's James Seyffart had asked BlackRock's Head of Digital Assets Robert Mitchnick when he thought the large banks might open the flood gates. He had expected the fourth quarter.

"Certainly this year is likely," he said.

It's unclear when the other large banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, plan to change their policies to follow suit in soliciting clients. For now, according to CNBC, they still follow the policy that advisors will only sell Bitcoin ETFs to clients if they ask.

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