67% of Wealth Managers Still Hold No Crypto

Sixty-seven percent of wealth managers still have no cryptocurrency exposure in their clients' portfolios, according to a poll Bitwise ran at its own event for roughly 400 financial advisors on September 13, a figure that undercuts the narrative of institutional crypto adoption running well ahead of retail even as the same room of advisors said, by a 60% margin, that they plan to add an allocation within the next year.

Bitwise Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen and Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan presented the poll live, covering ground that ranged from bitcoin and ether to Solana, Hyperliquid, stablecoins and tokenization. Alongside the two-thirds-zero-allocation figure, 60% of the same audience said they expect crypto prices to finish 2026 higher than where they stood on the day of the poll — meaning a majority of advisors are simultaneously bullish on price and still sitting on the sidelines with client money.

The gap between sentiment and allocation is not new, but the poll's own caveat is worth taking seriously: this was an informal audience show-of-hands at a Bitwise-run event, not a randomized survey of the wealth-management industry at large. Advisors who show up to a crypto asset manager's presentation already self-select toward crypto-curiosity, which likely means the true share of the broader advisor population with zero crypto exposure is higher, not lower, than the 67% figure suggests.

A separate, more methodologically rigorous data point lends some support to the trend line even if the headline number is soft. The Bitwise/VettaFi 2026 Benchmark Survey of financial advisors, run independently of the September event poll, found that 32% of advisors allocated to crypto in client accounts during 2025, up from 22% the year before, while the share of advisors who say they can even purchase crypto for clients rose to 42% from 35%. Among portfolios that already hold digital assets, the survey found allocations sized larger than 2% are becoming more common, suggesting the advisors who do buy in are no longer treating crypto as a token gesture.

Taken together, the two data points describe an industry moving in the right direction from Bitwise's perspective, but starting from a much lower base than the size of crypto's institutional headlines might imply. ETF flows, corporate treasury purchases and stablecoin volumes have dominated the institutional-adoption story for much of the past two years — flows that were running at their best weekly pace since October 2025 just before this poll — yet the wealth-management channel, the actual financial advisors managing money for individual clients, still lags noticeably behind. It's a similar gap to the one showing up in separate polling of retail investors, where stated interest in crypto consistently runs ahead of actual portfolio exposure. If even half of the 60% who told Bitwise they plan to allocate within 12 months follow through, that would represent a meaningfully larger pool of new institutional demand than current adoption figures suggest is already priced in.

Whether that follow-through happens likely hinges less on advisor sentiment, which by Bitwise's own numbers is already skewing bullish, than on the specific obstacles advisors themselves flag year after year in the fuller Bitwise/VettaFi benchmark survey: regulatory uncertainty, cited by 53% of advisors as a top obstacle, and home-office restrictions that bar advisors at larger firms from buying crypto for clients at all, cited by 48%. Custody concerns and difficulty valuing less liquid tokens round out the list. Those are structural, firm-level barriers rather than a lack of conviction, which is why 99% of the advisors who already held crypto in 2025 told the same survey they plan to hold steady or add more in 2026 despite the volatility. Rasmussen and Hougan's pitch, in effect, is that those structural hurdles are falling faster than the allocation numbers currently show.