By the end of 2025, digital assets have become part of real portfolios rather than just experiments. ETPs now hold roughly $120–$135 billion in assets worldwide, and tokenized Treasury funds have grown into a multibillion-dollar segment. In that environment, clients no longer wonder whether they “should own some bitcoin.” They want to know how it fits into a long-term plan built around stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives.

That shift changes the picture for financial advisors. If digital assets are now alongside core holdings in the same accounts, the question is when, how, and to what extent they belong in a client’s portfolio, if at all.

As we watch how institutional investors adjust their playbooks ahead of 2026, three trends stand out. Allocations are small and deliberate, most exposure goes through regulated products, and hybrid portfolios are on the rise. Let’s take a closer look at how these habits can help advisors translate institutional practice into day-to-day planning decisions.

Sizing First, Speculation Last

If you look at how institutional investors are actually using digital assets, you’ll notice that they give them very little portfolio space. So digital exposure may have moved into mainstream portfolios, but it hasn’t taken over them.

That point became more explicit when Bank of America expanded access to crypto ETPs for its wealth management clients. The bank positioned digital assets as a low-single-digit allocation, typically in the 1%–4% range, and only for clients who understand and accept higher volatility.

Public disclosures move in the same way. Recent 13F filings reveal that more institutions hold bitcoin ETFs, yet those positions remain modest and sit quietly alongside far larger allocations to equities, fixed income, and cash.

This restraint is intentional. Institutions aren’t treating digital assets as a high-conviction bet that needs to drive returns. Instead, they see them as a risk-budgeted component, sized small enough to contribute over time, but not large enough to destabilize the portfolio when volatility inevitably spikes.

For financial advisors, that framing means the task now is to define how much space digital assets deserve inside a client’s overall risk profile. A small, pre-defined allocation changes the dynamic. It makes digital exposure easier to explain, monitor, and rebalance. More importantly, it shifts decision-making away from short-term price moves and back toward portfolio structure and discipline.

Regulated Rails Matter More Than the Asset Itself

What institutions have been consistent about is that control comes before conviction. That’s why professional crypto exposure concentrates in regulated wrappers, institutional-grade custody, and reporting. This aligns with how advisory firms already run supervision, compliance, and client statements.

For financial advisors, the risk conversation is rarely about price swings alone. The more serious problems are operational and fiduciary. Where does the asset sit, and who can move it? How is it priced, reconciled, and reflected in tax and performance reporting? Regulated products and custody don’t eliminate volatility, but they pull these risks into a framework that advisors can control and defend.

That framework is also getting clearer at the U.S. policy level. In December 2025, the OCC issued Interpretive Letter 1188, confirming that national banks may engage in “riskless principal” crypto-asset transactions. This allows banks to intermediate client trades through offsetting buy-and-sell orders without holding crypto inventory as a standalone business.

As a result, this changes what “doing it responsibly” looks like. Digital exposure gets judged on process: custody, pricing, reporting, and rebalancing discipline. If an exposure can’t live inside those rules, it doesn’t belong in a client portfolio. And once regulated wrappers resolve the “how to hold” question, the “what to hold” question follows just as quickly.

Hybrid Portfolios Are Increasingly Discussed as a Potential Baseline

In our view, hybrid portfolios are the most practical way to bring digital assets to U.S. clients in 2026. They allow advisors to introduce digital exposure as part of a broader allocation that already includes traditional tools. Tokenization is doing the real work here. By moving cash-like instruments onto blockchain, it improves settlement speed, collateral mobility, and operational efficiency.

The trend is most visible in how market leaders implement it. BlackRock (NYSE:), for instance, has scaled its tokenized Treasury fund (BUIDL) into a multi-billion-dollar product and made it collateral-eligible in institutional workflows. J.P. Morgan, in turn, with its $50 million on-chain commercial paper transaction on , showed that even short-dated corporate funding can be issued on blockchain.

So when institutions of this caliber operationalize tokenization, hybrid portfolios move out of the pilot phase. And this framework may serve as a reference for advisors

Live use by large asset managers and banks sets expectations around custody, controls, and reporting, making hybrid allocation a repeatable structure. It gives advisors a framework to size exposure, align it with risk profiles, and manage it with discipline.

Taken together, all mentioned trends point to a consistent stance heading into 2026: keep allocations small and rules-based, rely on regulated rails, and treat tokenized cash and collateral as part of portfolio operations. Advisors who work within this model spend less time defending “why crypto” and more time executing “how it fits.” That’s what holds up under volatility and scrutiny.

Nevertheless, advisors who prefer to avoid adding digital exposure can rely on traditional assets as a workable toolkit. The decision comes down to the client mandate, risk budget, and whether the position can be managed within the advisor’s control and reporting framework.