Young, wealthy Americans appear to be rewriting the corporate rules around wealth management.
They prefer broad stock indexes. They park their cash in Treasury bills. They still buy real estate and private transactions. but They also expect Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other digital assets to be available online. Same dashboard as the others.
For them, cryptocurrencies are a regular part of their portfolio. But for many advisors, it remains a compliance issue and a career risk.
There is a chasm between young investors and advisors, and that chasm is widening by the day. Zerohash’s new “Cryptocurrency and the Future of Wealth” report surveyed 500 investors between the ages of 18 and 40 in the United States with household incomes ranging from $100,000 to more than $1 million.
Most of them already work with financial advisors and personal wealth management companies. However, when it comes to cryptocurrencies, a large portion run separate stacks of apps, exchanges, and wallets, as advisory firms cannot or will not touch cryptocurrencies.
Over the next 20 years, tens of trillions of dollars will flow from older Americans to younger heirs and charities. Those who will receive that capital are already treating 5-20% crypto allocations as normal and benchmarking advisors on whether they can take on that reality without blowing up their fiduciary duties, tax planning and basic cybersecurity.
The decision young wealthy customers must make is simple. If you don’t manage the parts of my portfolio that I value most, I’ll find someone else to manage them.
Demand signals that Wall Street tried to pretend didn’t exist
The numbers from Zerohash’s survey are straightforward: around 61% of wealthy young adults aged 18-40 already own cryptocurrencies. This percentage rises to 69% among the highest earners in the sample, with most people not thinking of cryptocurrencies as a fun lottery ticket. Among high-income investors, 58% invest 11-20% of their portfolio in digital assets.
For all of them, cryptocurrencies sit in the same mental bucket as real estate or core equity funds, rather than as a side bet. The survey notes that 43% of young investors allocate 5-10% of their portfolio to cryptocurrencies, 27% allocate 11-20%, and 11% allocate more than 20%. Zerohash also added that 84% of crypto holders plan to increase their allocation over the next year.
These are demand-side numbers.
On the supply side, the advisory channel is basically a ghost town. The survey showed that 76% of crypto holders invest independently outside of a brokerage or asset management company. Only 24% hold cryptocurrencies through an advisor.
They are not BTC maximalists living in cold storage. These are people who already pay a basis point fee for advice but feel the need to run a separate portfolio in a separate tab in their browser.
Their money is already on the move, with 35% of all wealthy investors in the sample saying they have moved assets away from advisors that do not offer crypto.
For the top group with annual incomes of $500,000 to $1 million or more, that share jumps to 51%. More than half of those who quit moved between $250,000 and $1 million each.
Yet, the same data set shows how easy it is for asset managers to retain these customers. Approximately 64% of respondents said they would stay with an advisor longer or bring in more assets if the advisor offered them crypto access. 63% say they would feel more comfortable investing through an advisor if digital assets were on the same portfolio dashboard as stocks and bonds.
The main point is that the bar for advisors is very low. The hurdle is not “becoming a crypto hedge fund,” but “recognizing that this asset class exists and can be held within the same reporting stack.”
Layer this on top of Great Wealth Transfer and the stakes are very high and very fast. Cerulli and RBC estimate that the total amount of wealth transferred from older Americans to younger generations and charities will range from $84 trillion to $124 trillion by the 2040s.
Inheritance and business income barriers are drifting towards the cohort that already treats cryptocurrencies as a regular part of their portfolio.
Advisory machine is built for everything except on-chain
If the demands are so clear, why do so many advisors still default to “I can’t touch that”?
Part of the answer lies in product design. For a long time, the only way for advisory firms to incorporate crypto exposure into model portfolios was through weird closed-end funds, trust structures, or offshore vehicles that no one wanted to explain in a compliance exam.
Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs are still on the market, and many RIAs and broker-dealers treat their tickers as curiosities.
Then there’s the paperwork. Investment policy statements written over the past decade often lump Bitcoin together with penny stocks and options as a “prohibited speculative product.” Changing this language would require a committee meeting, an E&O review, and a legal memo. The path of least resistance for mid-level compliance personnel is usually to write “Not approved at this time.”
Below that is the Parental Rights Act. Under SEC rules, registered advisers are required to hold client funds and securities with a “qualified custodian.” “Qualified Custodian” generally means a bank, broker-dealer, or similar institution that meets strict security measures.
For years, cryptocurrencies did not fit neatly into these boxes. And the coveted SAB 121 (Staff Accounting Report 121) further complicated matters by forcing public banks that hold digital assets to record a corresponding liability on their balance sheets.
The blockage started to clear up. In early 2025, the SEC issued new guidance and no-action remedies that make it easier for state-chartered trust companies to serve as qualified virtual currency custodians, effectively repealing SAB 121. The regulatory stack may still seem like uncharted waters for many, but we no longer treat digital assets like radioactive waste.
However, in the field, new partners are rushing into the gap. Fidelity Crypto for Wealth Managers provides custody and trade execution through Fidelity Digital Assets, which is connected directly to the same Wealthscape interface that RIAs already use for stocks and bonds.
Eaglebrook Advisors runs model portfolios and SMAs focused on BTC and ETH for asset managers, with portfolio reporting and billing built into standard RIA systems. BitGo has built a platform aimed at asset management that ties eligible custody to a TAMP-style overlay.
Anchorage Digital markets itself as a regulated digital asset custodian with reporting, reconciliation, and governance controls designed expressly for RIAs.
On paper, mid-sized advisory shops can now sign cryptocurrency sleeves with partners who are already recognized by the institutional world. But in reality, the pipes within many companies are still stuck at the last cycle. OMS and PMS systems do not always know what to do with the staking yield. The billing logic has a problem with the on-chain position.
Therefore, advisors do what they know how to do. In other words, it stalls.
Structural gaps show up in the behavioral zero-hash numbers. 76% of crypto holders surveyed purchase and manage their own digital assets. That means they already know how to move funds through exchanges, hardware wallets, and on-chain apps. For that cohort, the advisor becomes essentially useless for purchasing Bitcoin, Ethereum, or a number of other coins ranging from XRP to DOGE. Their value lies in tax, property and risk engineering for what their clients are already doing.
This is where the idea of an “advisor knowledgeable in cryptocurrencies” becomes important. Today, serious clients under 40 don’t care if their advisor can quote the Nakamoto Consensus section of the Bitcoin whitepaper. They care about whether the advisor can:
- Convert 5-15% BTC/ETH sleeves into IPS that investment committees and E&O carriers can bear.
- Set rebalancing boundaries to ensure your position doesn’t silently grow to 40% in a bull market.
- Decide when to use ETFs for easier tracking, or hold coins directly for long-term convictions or on-chain activity.
- Map these holdings to your estate plan, including how your heirs can inherit a multisig or hardware wallet without locking themselves out.
It’s not science fiction anymore. It’s just a good old-fashioned financial advisor job. And young, wealthy investors are starting to use this result as a scorecard.
Follow assets
Zerohash’s research shows that execution on traditional investment platforms is slow motion.
Let’s start with the important points. 35% of wealthy investors aged 18-40 have already transferred their assets from advisors that do not provide access to cryptocurrencies. Among the most profitable sectors, its share is 51%. More than half of retirees had household incomes between $250,000 and $1 million.
Let’s think about it from a revenue perspective. A $750,000 account charged at 1% would cost $7,500 per year. They lose 10 of those relationships because they can’t stomach a 5-10% Bitcoin sleeve and spend the equivalent of a junior advisor’s salary. Losing 50 puts you in “there used to be an office in that town” territory.
The path typically looks like this:
First, the client opens their account or mobile app and discloses information while the advisor is confused. They buy multiple coins on spot BTC ETFs or mainstream exchanges.
Then, as that bucket grows and starts to feel real, you go find someone who can treat it as part of a serious balance sheet.
Crypto-focused RIAs and multifamily offices have embraced the brief, from California-based DAiM to startups like Abra Capital Management.
In the process, TikTok, YouTube, and Discord serve as new discovery layers. The creator explains how to run a 60/30/10 portfolio using T-Bills, index ETFs, and BTC/ETH sleeves. In the podcast, a family office CIO casually talks about budgeting 5% for digital assets. The message is: It means that even if your advisor can’t even discuss this, others will.
Culture becomes circulation. A golden aura surrounds mahogany offices, golf club memberships, and branded wirehouses next to screens displaying real-time P&L for your Coinbase or Binance account.
For customers under 40, trust is starting to look more like margin, qualified custody, hardware wallets, 2FA, and the ability to see everything in one portal, rather than just the logo they grew up watching on CNBC.
Zerohash research supports this. 82% of respondents said they would feel more comfortable using cryptocurrencies in their advisory portfolios as companies like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley move into digital assets. It’s a brand halo used in a new way, not touting a firm’s own stock-picking skills, but to validate new asset classes it already owns.
At the heart of all this is portfolio design, which is boring in a good way. The richest young investors in the survey sit inside a barbell, with government bonds and broad indexes on one side, a 5-20% crypto sleeve on the other, and some private deals and real estate sprinkled in between.
They are not trying to reinvent modern portfolio theory. They’re just adding another bucket of risk, and they’re asking why the person who’s managing everything else in their life can’t help them manage this risk.
What kind of advisory work is “appropriate for cryptocurrencies”?
On the policy front, it lists Bitcoin and Ethereum as permitted assets for IPS, subject to prescribed caps, with clear language regarding liquidity events, rebalancing bands, and concentration limits.
On the product side, the company offers a simple menu of spot ETFs for customers who value convenience and ease of tax filing. Direct coins managed by institutions for those who want on-chain access. Minimize any exposure to alts and use only in products that pass compliance checks.
On the operational side, choose a partner that connects to your existing reporting and billing systems. Perhaps Fidelity Crypto for custody and execution, Eaglebrook or Bitwise strategies in model portfolios, and Anchorage or BitGo for more advanced clients requiring governance features and staking.
We will also work on cybersecurity. We also cover how to talk about hardware wallets, key backups, SIM swap risks, and what happens if a client loses access.
On the human side, stop treating cryptocurrency questions as a nuisance and start treating them as an early warning system. A client who silently transferred $500,000 to an independent platform because you refused to even discuss Bitcoin is telling you something. It’s not necessarily about their risk tolerance, but it’s about how fungible they think you are.
All of this on top of the $80 trillion-plus to $120 trillion-plus wealth barrier that will be transferred from baby boomers to their successors over the next 20 years. The inheritors of that capital grew up in a world where spending and transferring money felt as normal as bank transfers, and they’re busy monitoring which advisors respect that reality.
The window is open for Wall Street, but it won’t stay open forever. The first wave of crypto-enabled RIAs, family offices, and fintech platforms are already laying the groundwork for incorporating Bitcoin and digital assets into mundane wealth management without blowing up fiduciary duties, tax planning, and cybersecurity.
While the customer quietly exits the account, others can continue to debate whether the 5-10% cryptocurrency sleeve belongs in the portfolio.
Wealth transfers are happening both ways. The question is, when AUM lands, who can book it?
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
