Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.
-
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan has said major financial institutions will soon start soliciting Bitcoin ETF investments from their clients.
-
Hougan believes Bitcoin ETFs will see record ETFs this year.
-
Strategy Chair Michael Saylor has advised against waiting for this outcome to play out.
Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have been among the most successful ETF launches in history. But they have also been operating with a handicap.
Amid risk concerns, most banks have restricted wealth advisors from pitching Bitcoin ETFs to their clients. This may be set to change soon in a move that could turbocharge inflows to these funds and Bitcoin’s price.
Don’t Miss:
Bitwise investment chief Matt Hougan has said that the big four wirehouses, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) and UBS (NYSE:UBS), which control over $10 trillion in customer assets, will soon start offering Bitcoin ETFs to their clients.
Wirehouses are large financial institutions that provide a wide range of services, including investment advice and wealth management.
“By and large, these platforms have not yet allowed their advisors to easily access bitcoin ETFs,” Hougan said in a Tuesday note, adding, “I suspect all four wirehouses will be open for business on bitcoin ETFs by the end of the year.”
This expectation is one of the reasons why Hougan still believes Bitcoin ETF inflows would hit a record this year, even though inflows have been slower. For context, these investment products have only seen $3.7 billion in net inflows year-to-date, well behind the $35 billion recorded in all of 2024.
Hougan has been expecting wirehouses to start offering Bitcoin ETFs to clients since the first half of last year. At the time, he said Bitwise was having “serious due diligence discussions with major wirehouses, institutional consultants and large corporations.”
Trending: New to crypto? Get up to $400 in rewards for successfully completing short educational courses and making your first qualifying trade on Coinbase.
To be sure, there has been some movement, but it has been limited. For example, in August, Morgan Stanley said that it would allow advisors to solicit Bitcoin ETF investments from clients, but it limited the move to clients with a net worth of at least $1.5 million.
