Why Crypto Belongs in Your Practice

When clients self-custody crypto on Coinbase, Kraken, or through ETFs, that is AUM your firm does not manage and cannot bill on. Those assets sit outside your practice, invisible to your reporting and excluded from your fee calculations.

Consider a hypothetical example: a client with $10M in assets and a 2% crypto allocation. That represents roughly $200K in assets managed elsewhere. Across a book of 100 similar clients, that could mean $20M in AUM leaking out of your practice.

By offering crypto through your firm, you capture that allocation, increase AUM, and generate additional fee revenue. Instead of losing those assets to self-custody platforms, you bring them under management where they belong.

Blockchain technology is being integrated across traditional finance: settlement, tokenization of real-world assets, and cross-border payments. These are not experimental projects. They are live, production systems at major institutions.

Central banks worldwide are exploring Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The SEC has approved spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, providing regulatory clarity that did not exist even two years ago.

Digital assets are becoming a permanent fixture in the financial landscape, not a passing trend. Advisors who adopt early position their firms for the next decade of growth, building expertise and client trust ahead of the curve.