Your clients are already forming views on digital assets, with or without you. About $124T of wealth moves to younger heirs over the next two decades, and 62% of those heirs already raise digital assets with their adviser unprompted.1 Ownership splits sharply by age: 45% of Gen Z and Millennials hold crypto against 18% of Gen X and Boomers.1 Tokenisation is meanwhile widening what counts as an investable asset at all. None of this requires an intermediary to hold a view on where bitcoin trades next. However, it does require an opinion on these four questions because clients are already asking them.
How do gold and bitcoin benefit from US dollar debasement?
US federal debt now exceeds $40T. Debasement is simply the dollar losing purchasing power, and it becomes a live question when markets expect part of that burden to be eroded through inflation, low real rates or central bank support. Gold and bitcoin answer it the same way: with supply that cannot respond to demand. The above-ground gold stock grows around 1% a year. Bitcoin has a programmed issuance schedule and a fixed maximum supply.
Gold’s claim here is established. Central banks bought 863 tonnes in 2025, after 1,092 tonnes in 2024, and ETFs took a further 801 tonnes.2 Bitcoin’s is younger but building: US spot ETFs have drawn more than $54B of cumulative net inflows since launching in 2024, and realised volatility has trended lower as liquidity has deepened.3
Both assets pulled back this year: gold from a January record, bitcoin over a more volatile twelve months. That is a known feature of the argument, not a refutation of it: a store-of-value thesis is not settled by short-term price action. Gold offers the longer track record and established reserve demand; bitcoin offers a digitally native, fixed-supply version with higher potential upside and higher drawdown risk. For advisers, the useful question is whether the two can play complementary roles at different position sizes.
How large can the stablecoin market grow to?
Stablecoins are dollar-linked tokens backed by cash and short-term Treasuries. The market itself is about $300B today, and Citi’s base case is $1.9T by 2030 against a $4T bull case.4
The route there is payments rather than speculation. Business-to-business flows accounted for $226B, roughly 60% of identifiable stablecoin payment volume, and Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe are all building or integrating stablecoin rails. Every regulated stablecoin dollar is also a Treasury buyer: Tether alone holds $141B of Treasury exposure, which would place it inside the top 20 of all holders. The $4T is not the figure that matters. The direction and the tailwinds are.
Is tokenisation changing how portfolios are constructed?
Tokenisation issues a legal interest in an asset as a transferable digital record. It already covers tokenised Treasury funds at $16.0B, private credit at $7.8B, equities at $2.6B and private equity and venture at $2.3B. Citi’s base case is a $5.5T tokenised market by 2030, traditional and tokenised systems running side by side for some time.4
What changes is implementation rather than strategic asset allocation: smaller minimums, transfers around the clock, quicker settlement, automated income payments and faster mobilisation of collateral. Together these make private-market allocations easier to size and open specialist strategies to a broader investor base. The constraints remain the intermediaries to underwrite, and they are not trivial: liquidity, legal title, valuation, custody, suitability, tax and interoperability.
What are your clients holding that you’re not seeing?
This is the least comfortable question of the four. CoinShares’ own 2026 survey of 2,230 affluent investors holding at least $500k in investable assets, across seven global markets including the five this piece reaches, found digital asset ownership running between 58% and 70% among them.5 A companion CoinShares and Citywire survey of 261 European wealth managers found a quarter of advisers reporting that more than half of their clients’ digital asset exposure sits outside their management, rising to 52% in the UK.6 In Germany and the UK, close to four in ten digital asset investors are not served on digital assets by a wealth manager but say they would consider one.5 Across all five markets, between 32% and 41% of those who do have a manager describe them as too conservative on the subject, with Switzerland highest and the UK lowest.⁵ Whatever the merits of that judgement, it is being made, and it is being made without the adviser in the room.
This data suggests that the intermediaries who will be caught out in 2026 are not the ones who decided against digital assets; they are the ones who never got round to deciding.
Sources
1 The Daily Upside, “The Great Wealth Transfer May Become the Great Alts Boom”
2 World Gold Council, central bank and ETF gold demand 2024–25
3 Bloomberg, cumulative US spot bitcoin ETF net inflows since Jan 2024
4 Citi Institute, GPS stablecoin update Sep 2025; Citi Tokenization 2030
5 CoinShares, Affluent Investor Crypto Report, 2026
6 CoinShares and Citywire, European Wealth Management & Digital Assets Survey, 2026