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Financial advisors who ignore Bitcoin ditched by young wealthy Americans
The Great Wealth Transfer has a new filter test for advisors: if you don’t speak crypto, you don’t get the account.
Andjela Radmilac
Nov. 22, 2025 at 8:00 pm UTC
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A glowing Bitcoin erupts from a cracked briefcase amid flying documents and electric blue energy against a vivid orange-teal city skyline.
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Younger, wealthier Americans seem to be rewriting the house rules of wealth management.
They like broad equity indices. They park cash in T-bills. They still buy real estate and private deals. But they also expect to see Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a handful of other digital assets on the same dashboard as everything else.
For them, crypto is a normal slice of a portfolio. For many of their advisors, though, it’s still a compliance headache and a career risk.
That gap between young investors and advisors is there, and it’s getting wider every day. Zerohash’s new “Crypto and the Future of Wealth” report surveyed 500 investors aged 18–40 in the US with household incomes ranging from $100,000 to over $1 million.
Most of them already work with a financial advisor or private wealth manager. Yet when it comes to crypto, a big chunk runs a separate stack of apps, exchanges, and wallets because their advisory firm either can’t or won’t touch it.
Tens of trillions will flow from older Americans to younger heirs and charities over the next two decades. The people set to receive that capital already treat a 5–20% crypto allocation as usual, and they’re now benchmarking advisors on whether they can underwrite that reality without blowing up fiduciary duty, tax planning, or basic cybersecurity.
The decision younger wealthy clients have to make is simple: if you won’t manage the part of my portfolio I care most about, I’ll find someone who will.
The demand signal Wall Street tried to pretend wasn’t there
The numbers from Zerohash’s survey are blunt: around 61% percent of affluent 18–40-year-olds already hold crypto. That share climbs to 69% among the highest earners in the sample, and most don’t see crypto as a fun lottery. Among high-income investors, 58% put 11–20% of their portfolios into digital assets.
For all of them, crypto sits in the same mental bucket as real estate and core equity funds, not as a side bet. The study notes that 43% of young investors allocate 5–10% of their portfolios to crypto, 27% allocate 11–20%, and 11% allocate more than 20%. Zerohash also adds that 84% of crypto holders plan to increase those allocations over the next year.
Those are the numbers for the demand side.
On the supply side, the advisory channel is basically a ghost town. The survey showed 76% of crypto holders invest independently, outside their brokerage or wealth management firm. Only 24% hold crypto through an advisor at all.
These are not your BTC maximalists living in cold storage; these are people who already pay a basis-point fee for advice and still feel they have to run a separate portfolio in another browser tab.
Their money is already moving, as 35% percent of all affluent investors in the sample say they have shifted assets away from advisors who do not offer crypto.
Among the top-earning group on $500,000 to over $1 million, that share jumps to 51%. More than half of those who left moved between $250,000 and $1 million per head.
And yet, the same dataset shows how easy it would be for wealth managers to keep these clients. About 64% of respondents say they would stay with an advisor longer or bring more assets across if that advisor provided crypto access; 63% say they would feel more comfortable investing through an advisor if digital assets sat on the same portfolio dashboard as their stocks and bonds.
The main takeaway is that the bar for advisors is very, very low. The bar isn’t “become a crypto hedge fund,” but “recognize this asset class exists and can be held inside the same reporting stack.”
Layer this on top of the Great Wealth Transfer, and the stakes get very large, very fast. Cerulli and RBC estimate that total wealth moving from older Americans to younger generations and charities will be in the $84–$124 trillion range through the 2040s.
That wall of inheritance and business proceeds is drifting toward cohorts who already treat crypto as a regular part of their portfolio.
The advisory machine is built for everything except on-chain
If the demand is this clear, why do so many advisors still default to “we can’t touch that”?
Part of the answer sits in product design. For a long time, the only way an advisory firm could get crypto exposure into a model portfolio was through weird closed-end funds, trust structures, or offshore vehicles nobody wanted to explain in a compliance exam.
Even now, with spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs out in the wild, many RIAs and broker-dealers treat those tickers as curiosities.
Then there is the paperwork. Investment Policy Statements written in the past 10 years often lump Bitcoin into “prohibited speculative instruments” alongside penny stocks and options. Changing that language takes committee meetings, E&O reviews, and legal memos. The path of least resistance for a mid-level compliance officer is usually to write “not approved at this time.”
Underneath that sits custody law. Under SEC rules, registered advisers need to hold client funds and securities with a “qualified custodian,” which usually means a bank, broker-dealer, or similar institution that meets strict safeguards.
For years, crypto didn’t fit neatly into those boxes, and the coveted SAB 121 (Staff Accounting Bulletin 121) made life even more complicated by forcing public banks that held digital assets to record matching liabilities on their balance sheets.
That logjam has started to clear. In early 2025, the SEC rolled out new guidance and no-action relief that made it easier for state-chartered trust companies to serve as qualified crypto custodians, effectively retiring SAB 121. The regulatory stack might still look like uncharted waters for many, but it no longer treats digital assets as radioactive waste.
However, on the ground, a new cast of partners is rushing into the gap. Fidelity Crypto for Wealth Managers offers custody and trade execution through Fidelity Digital Assets, wired directly into the same Wealthscape interface that an RIA already uses for stocks and bonds.
Eaglebrook Advisors runs model portfolios and SMAs focused on BTC and ETH for wealth managers, with portfolio reporting and billing wired into standard RIA systems. BitGo has built a platform aimed at wealth management that ties qualified custody to a TAMP-style overlay.
Anchorage Digital pitches itself as a regulated digital asset custodian with reporting, reconciliation, and governance controls explicitly designed for RIAs