Interview with Morgan Stanley Digital Asset Strategy Head: Bitcoin Hitting $1 Million Isn't Impossible, But I Hope It Slows Down

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Guest: Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Morgan Stanley

Host: Natalie Brunell

Podcast Source: Natalie Brunell

Original Title: When Will Bitcoin Hit a New ATH? Wall Street Insider Explains

Air Date: June 10, 2026

Key Points Summary

Morgan Stanley, managing trillions of dollars in assets, is now bringing Bitcoin to its clients – its Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Amy Oldenburg, reveals a contrast in this conversation: MSBT set the firm's ETF first-day issuance record, yet most financial advisors are still reluctant to recommend it to clients because Bitcoin's price has mostly flatlined since the recommendation was made. She doesn't believe the next big surge will come from a specific new product or policy tailwind; instead, it may require a catalyst like a genuine event that shatters the traditional financial system. She wouldn't be surprised to see Bitcoin break $1 million within five years, but she just hopes the ascent happens more slowly.

Highlighted Insights

Tech Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

• "Every stage of my growth has been accompanied by some kind of technological change that, at the time, seemed incredibly obscure and even faced massive skepticism online – and it's only today that I can finally clearly see how the entire puzzle of history fits together."
• "Those old hands, the veteran traders on the other side of my trades back in the day, stuck with me through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial storm together, and it was the core, resilient members of that group who later became some of the earliest hardcore buyers of Bitcoin."
• "Bitcoin's earliest evangelists and heavy users came not only from the geek circles of Silicon Valley but also in large numbers from cross-border and international financial markets – those who were on the front lines of trading, desperately seeking alternatives to the traditional centralized banking system."

Why Bitcoin Made Sense Early On

• "In those less developed markets, the traditional brick-and-mortar banking system was extremely lagging, with the vast majority of the base population unable to open a bank account in their lifetime, so they had to fully rely on and embrace mobile money."
• "You're in a remote village with unpaved roads and no 24-hour electricity, and there's a little Vodafone stall like a lemonade stand with 'M-Pesa' written on it – that's where you load cash onto your phone."
• "Because we've worked deeply in so many emerging markets, we know firsthand that people there have every reason to embrace decentralization – the traditional financial infrastructure there is extremely unreliable, lacks contractual integrity, and is even accompanied by severe systemic corruption, all dark realities we experienced firsthand on the trading desk."

Why Aren't Institutional Investors All-In on Bitcoin?

• "Our entire group is structured legally as a bank holding company. This means we have to adhere to a much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements that belong to the banking system – because we have the Federal Reserve looming large over us."

Record Demand for MSBT

• "Of course you'd cheer for your own product, but you don't truly know what will happen until it actually goes live. The result surprised a lot of people."
• "Combining GSIB-level issuance with GSIB-level custody was both our first goal to bring to market and a way for us to understand what else the ecosystem still needs to develop."

Will Morgan Stanley Issue Digital Credit?

• "I know there's something in digital credit – but most people haven't even grasped Bitcoin yet, let alone the more advanced products on top of it."
• "Education is what's limiting the community, limiting the financial advisor community from accessing these products."
• "Some elements of these products are very attractive, but there's always a little something that doesn't quite fit together – a bit like the early BlackBerry story."

The Advisor Gap: Why Isn't Everyone Recommending Bitcoin?

• "If we had given the recommendation at $10,000 or $15,000 and it later rose to $100,000, the momentum would naturally be behind us – but interestingly, since the recommendation, we've largely been range-bound."
• "Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty; they must select appropriate assets for the specific client in front of them. Not every client is a growth investor."

What's Holding Bitcoin Back?

• "We always get stuck in black-and-white debates: will Bitcoin succeed or fail? But we live in a very complex world, with various narratives getting tangled together, diverting attention and allocations."
• "The attention and liquidity of global mainstream capital for asset allocation has been brutally fragmented."
• "I hate to say it, but it might really take a crisis – we shatter the existing system, and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact."

Corporate Balance Sheets

• "Banks don't hold Bitcoin not because they dislike it, but because there are more capital-efficient asset choices – if capital regulatory conditions don't improve, we'll focus our efforts on those more favorable assets."
• "If no one really needs tokenized stocks, we have no reason to spend a lot of money doing it – when the demand comes, we'll do it. The same logic applies to Bitcoin."

The Future of Bitcoin

• "I don't think we'll see a magical J-curve, suddenly taking off in 2027. A more likely scenario is that we continue to climb slowly, with more participants gradually entering, being educated, and slowly understanding."
• "Bitcoin at one million dollars? That's great, I don't see what's impossible. Given everything I've seen in my lifetime, I believe anything is possible."

Winner-Takes-All Tech vs. Redundant Finance: The Industry's Future

• "That 'winner-takes-all' culture you see in the tech world and many technology-related fields is completely at odds with financial services, where the nature is redundancy and numerous participants."
• "When we do an RFP, we start with a dozen, hoping to have a top three to choose from – but in technology, there's often only one, maybe two, that can truly meet our hard requirements."

Addressing Skepticism Towards Large Banks

• "In emerging markets, in those places, the 'distrust' of the traditional official financial system by ordinary people isn't some abstract theory from a textbook; it's the harsh, bleeding reality of every day."
• "From the perspective of a die-hard Bitcoin believer, taking spot Bitcoin out and putting it into a traditional financial institution's ETP is heresy in many people's eyes, but it's happening on a scale I didn't anticipate."
• "Holding an ETP share is not the same as holding Bitcoin – you own price exposure. This needs to be educated repeatedly."

Tech Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

Host Natalie Brunell: Today's guest is Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Morgan Stanley. Amy, I'd love to hear the story of how you got involved with Bitcoin and your legendary over-twenty-year journey at Morgan Stanley.

Amy Oldenburg:

I've been at Morgan Stanley for twenty-six years now, although that wasn't the original plan. I grew up in a small Midwestern town in Ohio. Interestingly – just like you asked me off-air before the show – 'How did you even get here? How did you embark on this crazy journey into digital assets and Bitcoin?'

Like you, I'm a deep Gen Xer, and I can totally relate to your experience. Sometimes seeing those memes online about how kids in the '80s and '90s grew up – you look back and realize that technology was subtly reshaping us from a very early age. I remember being seven or eight, my cousins and I would spend all day in the basement playing Atari, then the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, and Super Mario Bros. just blew our minds. It feels like every key milestone in my life has been accompanied by some disruptive technological wave.

One Christmas, my dad bought us a Tandy computer, and we started messing with the earliest computer games – it felt incredible at the time. Then technology kept galloping ahead. In high school, we were still learning basic typing in the computer lab; by college, tech was cutting deeper into our daily lives.

I remember one professor got a BlackBerry beta, and our entire marketing class became seed users. We sat in class, completely unable to imagine what it could be used for – because it had no apps, it was purely a brick of hardware. We complained, 'Okay, what's the difference between this and a pager from high school? It can send letters and numbers, but none of our friends have this thing, who are we sending it to?' Later it evolved into the version with the iconic full keyboard, becoming ubiquitous for a while, only to be suddenly made obsolete by the times. That's exactly what happened.

Funny enough, my major. I studied accounting, but the school rule was that accounting majors couldn't go abroad as exchange students. And all I could think about then was desperately escaping Ohio – the farther the better, send me to an international market across the ocean and I'd be happy. Since I couldn't go abroad, the next best thing was a domestic exchange program the school had in San Francisco. Since I was studying in New York at the time, in 1999, I packed my bags and went to San Francisco – only to land right in the middle of the craziest internet tech bubble.

Young and naive, I had no idea how insane the world was. In Silicon Valley, I started an internship the next day at an internet startup whose main business was helping Fortune 500 companies build websites. After two months of paid internship, I decisively dropped my accounting major, didn't even keep it as a minor. Because the feeling was so strong – this technological change happening would profoundly disrupt the future.

Back then, we followed the company to various industry conferences. Google was just a fledgling startup; they could only hand out small slips of paper at the venue to recruit, saying, 'If interested, please go to our Craigslist page to apply for a job at Google.' We raised an eyebrow, 'Google? What a dumb name? This business model makes no sense – who would use it to look things up? Can't possibly succeed.'

So you see, every stage of my growth has been accompanied by some kind of technological change that, at the time, seemed incredibly obscure and even faced massive skepticism online – and it's only today that I can finally clearly see how the entire puzzle of history fits together.

As for how I later entered digital assets and Bitcoin – I actually joined Morgan Stanley after the dot-com bubble burst. When the bubble burst, I stayed at that startup in San Francisco, then got transferred back to HQ in New York full-time. But everyone knew the environment had completely crashed – we were even forced to withdraw our S-1 filing, didn't successfully list, followed immediately by two brutal rounds of layoffs. I had to activate Plan B right away because I had rent to pay – and I absolutely refused to go back to Ohio.

It was at that critical moment that I stumbled into Morgan Stanley. A close friend worked in HR at Morgan Stanley, and she came to me, 'I know you're not into traditional finance right now, all about tech. But I have tons of positions to fill urgently; if you know anyone who needs a job or wants to interview, send them my way anytime.' I thought about it and decided maybe I should try myself, at least leave myself an out.

So, I crossed over into Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets team. The aftershocks of the Asian Financial Crisis (1997) were still lingering, the Mexican Tequila Crisis (1994) had just passed – emerging markets were a mess. The team I joined had gone through several leadership changes in just a few years. At the same time, we were also clearly feeling the severe impact of the tech bubble bursting on financial assets – that was around 2000, 2001. More dramatically, exactly nine months after I joined, 9/11 happened. Those days were just one crisis after another, with the underlying technological change still advancing frantically.

During my time at Morgan Stanley, I spent several years on the trading desk, specifically in Programmatic Trading and FX Trading for emerging markets. Those old hands, the veteran traders on the other side of my trades back in the day, stuck with me through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial storm together, and it was the core, resilient members of that group who later became some of the earliest hardcore buyers of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's earliest evangelists and heavy users came not only from the geek circles of Silicon Valley but also in large numbers from cross-border and international financial markets – those who were on the front lines of trading, desperately seeking alternatives to the traditional centralized banking system.

Because we've worked deeply in so many emerging markets, we know firsthand that people there have every reason to embrace decentralization – the traditional financial infrastructure there is extremely unreliable, lacks contractual integrity, and is even accompanied by severe systemic corruption, all dark realities we experienced firsthand on the trading desk.

So, it was through this hands-on experience on the financial trading front lines, combined with the connections I made early on in the tech world (like some friends who went into peer-to-peer file-sharing software very early), that I got exposed to Bitcoin extremely early and sensitively. And those digital trading and risk-management technical capabilities from back then later migrated very smoothly into the digital asset space.

Why Bitcoin Made Sense Early On

Host Natalie Brunell: Since you got into this circle so early, did you personally jump into investing early on, or did you hold off until later when traditional financial institutions officially entered and the whole industry became compliant before you started building a position?

Amy Oldenburg:

Not really. It's funny, my brother was over at my house last week, and we were reminiscing – around 2012 or so, he excitedly came to me saying he wanted to get some machines to mine Bitcoin. I straight up laughed at him, saying our family didn't have the kind of insanely powerful hardware needed to build a mining rig.

And you have to understand, the crypto environment back then was like a knife fight, extremely dangerous – nothing like today where you just download a sleek, elegant Coinbase app and click a few times in your browser to safely deposit and withdraw Bitcoin. Honestly, back then if you wanted to buy coins, your only choice was to deal with makeshift operations like Mt. Gox. And I was working at Morgan Stanley, thinking to myself: if I dare touch this stuff, I'll probably get fired tomorrow. For me back then, the compliance risk and operational cost were just too high. So, while I was heavily following and spent massive amounts of time observing the evolution from the sidelines, I was definitely not one of those hardcore miners hunched over computers coding early on.

Host Natalie Brunell: Let's take a more macro view – looking back at your investment experience in Emerging Markets, was there any core conclusion that directly corresponded to Bitcoin's later strong rise? Any bloody lesson from emerging markets that made you suddenly realize, 'Oh! So this is the root of why Bitcoin makes sense!'

Amy Oldenburg:

Yes, and the intuition was extremely strong. Going back to 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis. I think people following fintech today are familiar with M-Pesa (the Kenyan mobile money benchmark) and how mobile payments grew wildly in Africa and other emerging markets. But few know that our Morgan Stanley team was deeply involved in and invested in the IPO of its parent company, Safaricom, around 2006-2007.

On the front lines in East Africa at that time, we witnessed digital currency and mobile payment infrastructure sweep across that land at a mind-numbing speed – that explosive force was truly perception-shattering. Westerners living in America couldn't resonate with this change at all because our card system was too mature; Americans didn't have the pain points faced by ordinary Africans. Even more bizarrely, African people at the time were running this whole digital finance process on the most ancient non-smart flip phones, it wasn't even the smartphone era.

In those less developed markets, the traditional brick-and-mortar banking system was extremely lagging, with the vast majority of the base population unable to open a bank account in their lifetime, so they had to fully rely on and embrace mobile money.

Later I spent some time in Tanzania. When you walk in the most remote, unpaved villages without 24-hour electricity, you'd suddenly see a little yellow Vodafone booth by the roadside. The booth was as rudimentary as a lemonade stand kids might set up in the village, but it had four starkly visible words painted on it: M-Pesa.

That was where villagers loaded cash from their hands, turning it into digital assets on their phones. When you stand there physically, seeing how deeply this decentralized digital infrastructure penetrates society, seeing these financially marginalized people treat it as their only choice to change their fate, and the tangible sense of security it brings to these ordinary people – that kind of soul-shaking experience is inexpressible in words.

Try to empathize with that scene: those African women who go to the market every day to sell vegetables, bread, or run stalls to make a living. In the past, when they packed up and walked the dark road back to their village at night, their bodies were stuffed with the heavy cash they just earned. In the chaotic local security situation, this was like carrying a ticking time bomb.

But with mobile digital currency, as soon as they pack up, they can immediately deposit the cash at a roadside digital point, turning it into an encrypted string of numbers on their phone or digital card. When they walk home empty-handed in the dark, what they eliminate is the catastrophic risk of violent robbery at any moment, gaining a kind of absolute technological security they never experienced in traditional financial society.

Do you see? This underlying concept intertwining finance, assets, and life safety is completely on a different cosmic frequency from ordinary Western investors or Wall Street bankers sitting in sterile offices in Chicago or New York. And this is precisely the hardest core foundation of Bitcoin's early value logic.

Morgan Stanley Spot Bitcoin ETF

Host Natalie Brunell: So, what exactly catalyzed Morgan Stanley to step publicly into the spotlight – not only openly expressing support for Bitcoin but even directly launching Bitcoin spot-related products (like access and distribution of spot Bitcoin ETP/ETF) to the market?

Amy Oldenburg:

The root is 'client-driven.' At Morgan Stanley, one of the highest core principles the entire company lives and operates by daily is being client-driven. Clients are continuously expressing strong demand, and as a service provider, we naturally follow the market.

Of course, constrained by the industry's unique compliance framework, what we can do has its red lines at different stages. But as the regulatory environment keeps loosening and evolving – even looking at our E*TRADE business – I think before answering this question, it's necessary to quickly outline Morgan Stanley's massive business footprint.

We have several different business units: Institutional Securities – which is what everyone typically thinks of as investment banking, sales & trading, and research; then Wealth Management – with several sub-segments, including financial advisors, which we'll talk about later. We've also done a series of large acquisitions, one being E*TRADE – a self-directed trading online platform that brought us in front of a completely different client demographic through this technology platform. Then there's our Asset Management division – the product manufacturing unit, from corporate pensions to sovereign wealth funds to mutual funds and ETFs.

These products are distributed not only on our own wealth platform – that's just one channel – but also through relationships with other intermediaries, other banks, across the US and globally. Having such diversified businesses and being able to mobilize capabilities across multiple divisions simultaneously is very exciting.

Talking about Bitcoin exposure, we have Bitcoin ETPs, which come from our Asset Management division. Then there's spot trading, which we are gradually rolling out on E*TRADE now; you can buy spot Bitcoin directly on E*TRADE.

Why Aren't Institutional Investors All-In on Bitcoin?

Host Natalie Brunell: I understand that for an institution of Morgan Stanley's size, launching these things has to go through many hurdles – compliance, legal. Can you give us some inside scoop on why it took so long? On one hand, optimists say, 'It's a miracle Bitcoin got into a mainstream bank like Morgan Stanley in just sixteen years.' But on the other hand, radical believers ask, 'Since the opportunity is here, why aren't mainstream institutions willing to bet the farm and go all-in on Bitcoin?'

Amy Oldenburg:

There are a few different issues. First, the outside world often underestimates the extremely stringent systemic regulatory constraints hanging over our heads. Here we must clarify a concept: Morgan Stanley's underlying structure is fundamentally different from BlackRock's.

BlackRock is a pure, independent asset management company, while Morgan Stanley, although we also have a large-scale asset management business, our entire group is structured legally as a bank holding company. This means Morgan Stanley must adhere to a much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements belonging to the banking system – because we have the Federal Reserve looming large over us.

This is precisely one of the reasons why we couldn't flexibly push these crypto-related products online early like our independent asset management peers such as BlackRock. You can imagine how frustrating and agonizing it was for us sitting in the office when front-line tech was advancing by leaps and bounds, watching peers race ahead launching crypto products – we just stared at each other, countless times screaming inside wondering why we couldn't do it.

Another interesting point. We actually had a plan a few years ago to launch spot crypto business on E*TRADE. But unfortunately, during 2020-2021, many of the vendors we vetted, assessed, and even shortlisted no longer exist. So when we restarted this plan in 2024, we had to rebuild the entire proposal from scratch; much of the previous work was unusable.

Record Demand for MSBT

Host Natalie Brunell: The launch of MSBT set a record for the best first-day ETF performance in Morgan Stanley's history. What actual demand have you seen?

Amy Oldenburg:

As the product maker, of course you'd cheer for your product before launch – but honestly, before the code and product actually cut to the market and ring the bell to list, you're completely in suspense; no one knows what will really happen.

We heard many voices from Wall Street, some saying 'You have to get into this space,' others saying 'Why are you coming? There are already over twenty Bitcoin ETPs on the market; what's different about yours?' We did our utmost to differentiate – bringing institutional-grade architecture to this product. We entered the market with a 14 basis point fee, working hard on the total expense ratio. We also did something at the custody level, partnering with both Coinbase and BNY – the first in the market to partner with BNY on ETP custody.

So combining GSIB-level issuance with GSIB-level custody was both our first goal to bring to market and a way for us to understand what else the ecosystem still needs to develop. Because moving from here to more advanced products, there's a lot of work needed on that infrastructure, whether it's BNY, us, or other Wall Street GSIBs, to truly enter that 24/7 flywheel and continue advancing in this market.

Will Morgan Stanley Issue Digital Credit?

Host Natalie Brunell: Will Morgan Stanley launch innovative products like the digital credit launched by Strategy?

Amy Oldenburg:

Good question. I've met them at a few events recently; we've done a lot of work with their team – we were one of the main participants in the issuance of STRK, this digital credit product, so we are intimately familiar with the underlying logic and mechanisms of such assets.

Going back to my earlier story – I think it's hard for people to truly see its place in the whole puzzle. When I talk to financial advisors, some understand it very well, but a very large portion haven't even grasped Bitcoin yet, let alone more advanced products on top of it; there's still a lot of education needed. And such products have some characteristics; they don't fit into traditional classification boxes, lack ratings that some investors are accustomed to, they look different, behave differently – how do we help people understand them?

Today I asked a colleague involved in all ETP launches, 'What do you think is limiting the community, limiting the financial advisor community from accessing these products – whether ETPs or STRK or others?' She said directly, '100% education.'

Some elements of these products are very attractive, but there's always a little something that doesn't quite fit together, a bit like the BlackBerry story. I know something exists in there, but it just hasn't perfectly assembled yet. But I think it will eventually arrive; it just needs more time.

The Advisor Gap: Why Isn't Everyone Recommending Bitcoin?

Host Natalie Brunell: You mentioned financial advisors. As I understand, Morgan Stanley currently permits a 2% to 4% tactical allocation to Bitcoin in its official strategy. But as you said, the adoption and recommendation speed on the wealth advisor side lags far behind the fervent demand from front-end clients.

Amy Oldenburg:

This is a great question, and we're trying to understand the psychological factors behind this, which are as important as the financial ones. Our recommendation is for moderately aggressive investment portfolios, not for all clients, but those matching the risk appetite.

Looking at macro data, even though we've recently seen global inflation persistently rising, Bitcoin's price has actually declined. Its actual market performance still closely tracks high-risk assets like stocks. Honestly, from my personal asset management intuition, I really hope it can soon transform, behaving more like gold, a true hard asset with cross-cycle anti-inflation properties. So, this operational gap between 'theoretical digital gold' and 'real-world high-risk asset' indeed confuses countless clients and financial advisors.

That said, Morgan Stanley's official access recommendation is indeed there in black and white – some balanced portfolios are 0% to 2%, some more aggressive public growth portfolios are 2% to 4%. But what's extremely subtle is that since we opened up these allocation recommendations, Bitcoin's chart has actually been in a long-term sideways range, right?

If Morgan Stanley had given the official recommendation at Bitcoin's super low of $10,000 or $15,000, and it later skyrocketed to $100,000, then that insane profit-making effect and market momentum would naturally push all advisors forward. But interestingly, since the recommendation, we've roughly been range-bound, making people more hesitant about its direction; the psychological battle is very tough.

Especially when also dealing with other asset classes; private credit has been very hot the past few years, the valuation surge in the AI space also leaves everyone feeling confused and perplexed. You're helping clients manage these relationships, and one more thing to remember: not every client is a growth investor. Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty; they must find suitable assets for the specific client in front of them. Many of our clients with significant wealth, some really like innovative things and actively ask for them; others prefer to keep them in more reliable assets, valuing stable returns and capital preservation.

What's Holding Bitcoin Back?

Host Natalie Brunell: I've heard people say 'Bitcoin basically made a round trip from the 2021 high.' I can understand. Of course you need to take a long-term view, look at the timeframe, but what do you think is holding Bitcoin back? We're now in 2026, so many institutions and banks have entered; what exactly do you think is stubbornly holding Bitcoin back? We're now in 2026, so many top institutions and mainstream banks have publicly entered; Strategy is even mechanically buying like crazy every Monday; why haven't we hit the $200,000 peak yet?

Amy Oldenburg:

It's definitely not a single factor at play. We always tend to fall into those black-and-white binary debates: will Bitcoin ultimately succeed or go to zero? Is it digital gold or a bubble? But the reality is we live in a world of extremely complex underlying logic and gamesmanship. There was indeed a bullish wave recently; so many mainstream financial new products launched densely, greatly expanding its global distribution channels. But don't forget, just last year, traditional financial markets experienced an insanely wild gold and silver super rally, commodity trading was red-hot. Once when talking to a peer, they said bluntly to me: 'We've pulled our attention back from crypto assets; now the whole bank is doing intraday commodity trading.' See, the attention and liquidity of global mainstream capital for asset allocation has been brutally fragmented.

Host Natalie Brunell: So what do you think will be the catalyst to restart Bitcoin and make it more aligned with the positioning many Bitcoiners give it – a neutral reserve asset?

Amy Oldenburg:

I think it needs time. I hate to say this; maybe because I'm a child of the era who lived through the global financial crisis, the tech crisis, 9/11, even the COVID outbreak – crisis events completely change our thinking, and sometimes we never return to old ways of thinking. I don't want to say it might need a crisis; sometimes I also think it might be a 'slowly grinding crisis,' less dramatic, not as severe as COVID or the global financial crisis, but I'm not sure. Maybe it really needs that kind of event: we shatter the existing system, and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact.

For me, the evolution of digital asset activities is also interesting. Because my journey started more from the Bitcoin side, I believe in decentralization, especially from an emerging markets perspective – even if the power goes out, or the whole country collapses, you're still okay because the ecosystem and blockchain will be maintained by supporters elsewhere in the world. And now we're building a lot of digital asset stuff in very centralized ways. So I don't know; maybe after something goes wrong, people will return to the discussion of decentralization.

Last week at an event, I was talking to someone about the concept of agentic. One day we might return to the origin of proof-of-work because we truly recognize its value: when our inboxes are destroyed by AI agents, tons of spam, fakes, indistinguishable from real, we'll discover that a big part of Bitcoin's early technology was to solve the spam problem in email inboxes. We might really have to step back and say, 'This thing is very necessary.' My inbox is being destroyed by things sent by agents; I can't tell if a transaction is real or fake; what do you use to verify it? We might really return to Bitcoin's origin story.

Corporate Balance Sheets

Host Natalie Brunell: Many projects and tokens are nominally decentralized but highly centralized, more speculative. So what conditions are needed for US banks to put Bitcoin on their balance sheets?

Amy Oldenburg:

Not having to bear such heavy burdens in capital treatment, for sure. And I think banks aren't not doing it because they dislike Bitcoin, but because we also have to run a business. If there are assets that are more capital-efficient or regulated, we'll prioritize those. It's not an anti-Bitcoin stance; it just needs an environment that also supports the utilization of such assets from a collateral perspective, a trading and ecosystem perspective.

Even beyond Bitcoin, today in meetings discussing tokenization and tokenized stocks. Of course everyone's hot on tokenization again. But if no one really needs tokenized stocks, there's no motivation for us to spend so much money doing it. We can certainly be prepared, we can provide support, but ultimately if the demand is in traditional assets for lending, we can do traditional securities lending, provide services around traditional clients. If demand comes, if there's demand for tokenized assets, we'll do it too.

The same logic applies to Bitcoin. If we could use these assets the same way, if they could be used as collateral without adding balance sheet burdens, we'd be more motivated to spend more time going down that path.

The Future of Bitcoin

Host Natalie Brunell: If you were to make a prediction: what will the Bitcoin ecosystem look like in terms of adoption in five and ten years. How do you think it will evolve?

Amy Oldenburg:

I think it will continue to grow. By 2030, I think we'll see sustained, moderate adoption growth. I don't think we'll see a magical J-curve, suddenly taking off by 2027. A more likely scenario is similar to what we've experienced before: more participants keep coming in, they get educated, slowly understand, then prices rise, and we slowly climb like that.

I might be too experienced, too realistic, not making wild predictions. Bitcoin at one million dollars? That's great, I don't see what's impossible. Given everything I've seen in my lifetime, I believe anything is possible. But I also think anything that extreme takes time because if something that extreme happens, it usually means something else extreme happened.

So I think a gentle upward trend would be great; we want stability for the asset. One thing Bitcoin is criticized for is volatility, so I hope it can be more stable in the future, even if volatility still exists, but preferably more range-bound volatility.

What More People Should Know About Bitcoin

Host Natalie Brunell: Back to the education gap, what do you wish more people, including Morgan Stanley clients, understood about Bitcoin? What don't they currently understand or misunderstand?

Amy Oldenburg:

I said this in Vegas that time; I think the biggest misunderstanding is that when a series of crypto assets spread out, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, everyone thinks 'they're just crypto assets, all the same.' But they're not the same; they're very different. Each has its own characteristics. I think we should spend more time discussing these differences in the future – but currently it feels like the narrative has narrowed to 'they're just crypto assets,' especially seeing more centralized platforms launching. You have indeed been doing a good job of differentiating focus; you focus on Bitcoin, but I do think we need to spend more time discussing these differences.

Winner-Takes-All Tech vs. Redundant Finance: The Industry's Future

Host Natalie Brunell: I think there are issues within the industry itself, too much infighting.

Amy Oldenburg:

I often wonder why things happen a certain way, from user experience, brand psychology, and overall in the technology field, going back to my early experiences in tech, there's a 'winner-takes-all' mentality in the tech world.

Think about Nvidia; I can't remember when it was founded, but back when I was in the emerging markets team, we invested in Nvidia, treating it as a gaming investment because we were following the Asia gaming theme. Nvidia was making GPUs, and our experience during that period was quite painful, with no positive results for many years. You now hear Jensen Huang in various speeches reminiscing about the hardships, talking about how they were on the verge of bankruptcy several times early on. The market didn't buy their story back then; as an early public company, they endured an extremely long and dark period of hardship.

That 'winner-takes-all' culture you see in the tech world and many technology-related fields is completely at odds with financial services, where the nature is redundancy and numerous participants. Look at investment banking; every IPO has many banks competing, but they're all on the same issuance. The asset management industry has no single firm with over 3% market share; it's extremely fragmented. Even with the 'too big to fail' giants, scale effects exist, but the overall industry is still a hundred schools of thought contending.

In wealth management, we are indeed the largest in the US, but the second place is 30% smaller. Looking globally, it's extremely fragmented; Europe is highly fragmented, Asia too, each country has its own structure, understanding of wealth management, maybe through insurance companies, depending on regional savings incentives.

These two cultures – numerous participants and redundancy versus winner-takes-all – are hard to match. Because we constantly find that when looking for technology service providers to support our business, often only one can do it. We run RFP processes, usually starting with a dozen on the list, narrowing to five finalists, then three, hoping you can still pick a real winner from the top three, hoping all three are good choices. But technology often isn't like that; sometimes there's really only one, maybe two, that can meet those non-negotiable hard requirements.

Host Natalie Brunell: So what do you think is the reason for this lack of 'biodiversity'?

Amy Oldenburg:

I think it's determined by the environment; the financial services environment isn't VC-backed. We exist, sustain, survive on our own revenue, while technology often has an investor base constantly fighting for survival. I remember having dinner with a serial entrepreneur in San Francisco, maybe also 20 years ago; he had already sold one company and was building a second, very successfully. I listened, thinking: what's the revenue model for this thing? I couldn't see it at all. So I couldn't help but ask, 'So what's your revenue model?' He was shocked, 'What do you mean, revenue model? Don't you understand? I'm building a network; this is about network effects, not about revenue.'

Addressing Skepticism Towards Large Banks

Host Natalie Brunell: Part of my audience, whenever I mention institutions, ETFs, these financial products, their rebellious bones immediately stand up. Bitcoin has a cypherpunk spirit – it was designed for disintermediation, eliminating counterparty risk; it's the people's money. What would you say to those who oppose institutions entering Bitcoin, who are fundamentally skeptical of everything you're doing, as someone who's spent over twenty years inside a large banking institution?

Amy Oldenburg:

I completely understand, and on many levels, I deeply empathize. The better part of my career has been soaked in emerging markets, in those places where ordinary people's 'distrust' of the traditional official financial system isn't some abstract theory from a textbook; it's the bleeding, harsh reality of every day. This is absolutely not some 'Oh, that's old news from twenty years ago; I vaguely remember' – look at Russia now, look at Ukraine, those friends and peers we collaborated with on trading desks, who had their assets completely frozen overnight, even lost all their savings in brick-and-mortar banks. To protect their lifetime savings, to safely transfer their families to another country, they had to rack their brains to find a way out.

We watched friends around us go bankrupt, assets zeroed out in a sudden change. This isn't 20 years ago, nor the last Lehman crisis; this is the bloody reality happening right now (2026).

So, deep down, I actually live in these two diametrically opposed worlds simultaneously. On one hand, seeing the bad actors and egregious blowups that kept emerging in this industry over the past few years, I feel extremely pained – because these centralized scams scared away countless people yearning for financial sovereignty, severely hindering the spread of global consensus. But on the other hand, the set of ideas and philosophy of cypherpunk has immense value.

We need tools to continue scaling, for people to interact with it, but those tools haven't truly arrived. What arrived are highly centralized, very user-friendly tools that look exactly like all the tools consumers are already used to. I don't mean to nitpick, but the user experience was poor; it has improved but still isn't evolved enough.

One thing that really opened my eyes was when we launched the ETP, and last September the SEC approved the ability to physically transfer spot Bitcoin into ETPs. From a die-hard Bitcoin believer's perspective, taking spot Bitcoin out and putting it into a traditional financial institution's ETP is heresy in many people's eyes, but it's happening on a scale I didn't anticipate.

Why is that? Because people really need more services. Many people have not only built wealth but continue to believe in this whole set of ideas, but you still need to live your life, manage life's various events, whether borrowing, buying property, remittances, ensuring your estate can be passed to the next generation. Some people try to build these businesses; some succeeded, I'm not saying nothing exists outside, some tools have been built very successfully. But sometimes handing it over to a centralized institution is just simpler – from a security angle I'm afraid, from an estate management angle I'm also afraid.

And now we can provide capital markets services around it; for example, if you transfer Bitcoin into a Bitcoin ETP, you can place it on our wealth management platform. Now you're considered a wealth management client; depending on the transfer amount, you might be considered a high-net-worth client. We can provide financing up to 50% of the value of that ETP, meaning you can borrow up to 50% of the Bitcoin ETP's value and have liquidity to do other things. We've already seen clients exploring this model; we can provide services they can use for other transactions in life. For estate management, placing it on the wealth platform is indeed more convenient than self-custody.

But it's still inside an ETP; some people have told me, 'I have Bitcoin exposure, so if something goes wrong, I have Bitcoin.' I said, 'No, you don't have Bitcoin.' You hold shares of a Bitcoin ETP, giving you price exposure to Bitcoin. So I think education is multi-layered: first, what is Bitcoin? second, do you know the difference between holding spot Bitcoin and holding an ETP? third, do you know the difference between self-custodying Bitcoin and keeping it on a centralized platform? Anyone with exposure during the FTX period, keeping assets on centralized exchanges, went through those weeks when we didn't know which platforms were implicated. If your assets weren't self-custodied, you might have quickly moved to self-custody just to protect yourself from those failing platforms.

Host Natalie Brunell: What you're saying is very true; on one hand, these more traditional financial tools indeed unlock liquidity; people want to use them for down payments, borrow against Bitcoin for life's important milestones. But what fascinates me is the optionality; this is the first bearer instrument you can self-custody, memorize, ever. In the worst-case scenario, you can escape to another place. US Senator Cynthia Lummis said this in the Senate: it gives you a kind of freedom and a human rights tool nothing else provides. But if you want to accept counterparty risk, you can also hold it in a more traditional way.

Amy Oldenburg:

This is also my response to that question from the cypherpunk era; that set of ideas is fine; they should continue doing that. I hope those people keep doing it; I hope that part of it lasts long. At this year's Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, I noticed it felt different from the atmosphere at the 2021 one in Wynwood, Miami; that very deep exchange of self-sovereignty ideas had diminished at this conference. Maybe it's the evolution of the conference itself, maybe because more centralized platforms appeared, maybe because people like me, from Morgan Stanley, also showed up there. But I don't want to lose that spirit because it's a very important part of the ecosystem.

Host Natalie Brunell: I think Bitcoiners would appreciate when people in suits also advocate for self-custody and sovereignty. So maybe we can have the best of both worlds. Amy, before we end, any final thoughts, or anything we didn't cover you'd like to add?

Amy Oldenburg:

We're still in the early stages. Seeing the debate between quantum computing and Bitcoin – 'will quantum end it all' – and that we're still arguing about some very passive products, is indeed a bit regrettable. But I truly believe this is a long journey; when we talk about Bitcoin credit, or other more advanced products, there's much more ahead. We have new technology types – agentic AI, various evolving agents – maybe each of us will have our own agent in the future, maybe micropayments – all these will continue to influence what the future environment looks like. So I think digital assets are a very long road, and I'm very happy to invest the next part of my career in this space because I think we'll be doing this for quite a long time.