Morgan Stanley Digital Asset Head: Bitcoin Reaching $1M Would Not Be Surprising, But a Real Catalyst Might Require a Crisis That Shatters the Old System

Compiled & Edited by: Deep Chao 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

Broadcast Date:June 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

Morgan Stanley, which manages trillions of dollars in assets, is now bringing Bitcoin to its clients' attention. Its Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Amy Oldenburg, revealed a striking contrast in this conversation: MSBT set a record for the bank's ETF first-day issuance, while most financial advisors are still reluctant to recommend it to clients because Bitcoin's price has largely stagnated since the recommendation was made. She does not believe the next major surge will come from a specific new product or policy tailwind, but rather may require a genuine event that shatters the traditional financial system as a catalyst. She would not be surprised if Bitcoin surpasses a million dollars within five years, but hopes this ascent happens slowly.

Excerpt of Key Insights

Technological Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

• "Every phase of my life has been accompanied by some technological change that seemed incredibly obscure and faced massive skepticism at the time—and only today can I finally see clearly how the entire historical puzzle fits together."
• "Those old-timers, the veteran traders who were my daily trading counterparts back in the day, stuck with me through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial storm together, and it was the core members of that group who later became some of the earliest, most hardcore Bitcoin buyers."
• "The earliest Bitcoin evangelists and heavy users came not only from the Silicon Valley geek scene 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 physical banking system is extremely lagging. The vast majority of people at the bottom of the pyramid will never open a bank account in their lifetime, so they have no choice but to fully embrace and rely on mobile money."
• "You're in a remote village where electricity isn't even available 24/7, on dirt roads, and there's a little Vodafone stand like a lemonade stand with 'M-Pesa' written on it—that's where you turn your cash into digital money on your phone."
• "Because we have deep experience in so many emerging markets, we know firsthand that people there have very compelling reasons to embrace decentralization—their traditional financial infrastructure is extremely unreliable, lacks any contractual integrity, and is often plagued by systemic corruption. These are dark realities we witnessed firsthand on the trading desk."

Why Haven't Institutional Investors Fully Committed to Bitcoin?

• "Our entire group is legally structured as a bank holding company. This means we must adhere to a completely different, much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements belonging to the banking system—because the Federal Reserve looms large over us."

Record Demand for MSBT

• "Of course you talk up your own product, but you don't truly know what will happen until it goes live. The result surprised many."
• "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 needs to develop."

Will Morgan Stanley Issue Digital Credit?

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

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

• "If we had given the recommendation at $10,000 or $15,000 and then it went to $100,000, momentum would be at our backs—but interestingly, since the recommendation, we've been largely range-bound."
• "Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to select suitable assets for the client in front of them. Not every client is a growth investor."

What's Holding Bitcoin Back?

• "We always get stuck in this black-and-white debate: will Bitcoin succeed or fail? But we live in a very complex world, where various narratives are tangled together, diverting attention and allocation."
• "The attention and liquidity of global mainstream capital for asset allocation is being brutally fragmented."
• "I hate to say it, but it might actually take a crisis—where we break the existing system and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact."

Corporate Balance Sheet

• "Banks don't hold Bitcoin not because they dislike it, but because they have more efficient asset choices—if capital regulatory conditions don't improve, we'll focus our energy on those more advantageous assets."
• "If no one actually needs tokenized stocks, we have little incentive to spend much money building them—when demand comes, we'll do it. The same logic applies to Bitcoin."

The Future of Bitcoin

• "I don't think we'll see some magical J-curve and suddenly take off by 2027. More likely, we'll continue a slow crawl, with more participants gradually entering, getting educated, and slowly understanding."
• "Bitcoin at a million dollars? That's great, I see nothing impossible about it. Given everything I've seen in my life, I believe anything is possible."

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

• "That 'winner-take-all' culture you see in tech and many tech-related fields doesn't fit with financial services at all. The essence of financial services is redundancy and multiple participants."
• "When we do an RFP, we start with over ten candidates, hoping to have a choice of top three finalists—but in technology, often there's 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 isn't some abstract textbook theory; it's a bleeding, harsh reality every single day."
• "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."
• "Holding ETP shares is not the same as holding Bitcoin—you have price exposure. This needs repeated education."

Technological 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'm particularly interested in hearing your story of how you got involved with Bitcoin and your legendary experience of over twenty years at Morgan Stanley.

Amy Oldenburg:

I've been at Morgan Stanley for twenty-six years, though that wasn't originally the plan. I grew up in a small Midwestern town in Ohio. It's interesting—like you asked before the show: 'How on earth did you get to this point? How did you embark on this crazy journey into digital assets and Bitcoin?'

I'm a deep Gen Xer like you, and I can relate so much to your experience. Sometimes I see those memes online about how kids in the 80s and 90s grew up—you look back and realize technology was subtly reshaping us from a very early age. I remember around seven or eight, my cousins and I would spend hours in the basement playing Atari, then the NES came out, and Super Mario Bros drove us wild. It felt like every key point in my life was accompanied by some disruptive technological wave.

One Christmas, my dad got us a Tandy computer, and we started messing with the earliest computer games—it felt unbelievable back then. Then technology kept racing ahead. In high school, we were still learning basic typing in the computer lab; by college, tech began cutting deeper into our daily lives.

I remember one professor had beta access to a BlackBerry, and our entire marketing class became seed users. We sat in class, completely unable to imagine what it could be used for—because it didn't have any apps, it was pure brick hardware. We even complained, 'Okay, what's the difference between this and the pagers from high school? Sure, 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 iconic full-keyboard version, reaching a point where everyone had one, and then suddenly it was obsolete, which indeed happened.

Even more interesting was my major. I was studying accounting, but the school rule was that accounting majors couldn't go abroad on exchange programs. And all I could think about then was desperately escaping Ohio—the farther, the better. I'd have happily been sent to international markets across the ocean. Since I couldn't go abroad, the next best thing was a domestic exchange program the school had in San Francisco. Since I was in New York for school, in 1999, I packed my bags and went to San Francisco—only to land headfirst into the most frenzied Dot-com Bubble.

Young and naive, I had no idea how crazy the world in front of me was. In Silicon Valley, I started at an internet startup the very next day, whose main business was building websites for Fortune 500 companies. After a two-month paid internship, I promptly dropped my accounting major, didn't even keep it as a minor. Because the visceral feeling at the time was so strong—this technological change happening was absolutely going to profoundly disrupt the future.

Back then, we followed the company to all sorts of industry conferences. Google was just a fledgling upstart then; they could only pass out small slips of paper at booths saying, 'If interested, please go to our Craigslist page to apply for a job at Google.' We'd raise an eyebrow: 'Google? What kind of lame name is that? This business model makes no sense at all—who would use it to look things up? Impossible to succeed.'

So you see, every phase of my life has been accompanied by some technological change that seemed incredibly obscure and faced massive skepticism at the time—and only today can I finally see clearly how the entire historical puzzle fits together.

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

That's exactly when I stumbled into Morgan Stanley. A close friend of mine worked in HR at Morgan Stanley, and she came to me: 'I know you're not keen on traditional finance right now, completely focused on tech. But I have a ton of positions that desperately need filling. If you know anyone who needs a job or wants to interview, send them my way anytime.' I thought to myself, maybe I should give it a try, at least leave myself a backup option.

And so, I crossed over into Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets team. The aftershocks of the Asian Financial Crisis (1997) hadn't fully subsided, and the Mexican Tequila Crisis (1994) wasn't that long ago—the entire emerging markets space was in terrible shape. The team I joined went through several leadership changes in just a few years. At the same time, we were clearly feeling the severe impact of the tech bubble burst on financial assets—that was around 2000, 2001. Even more dramatic, exactly nine months after I joined, 9/11 happened. Those days were one crisis after another, while the underlying technological change continued to advance madly.

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

The earliest Bitcoin evangelists and heavy users came not only from the Silicon Valley geek scene 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 have deep experience in so many emerging markets, we know firsthand that people there have very compelling reasons to embrace decentralization—their traditional financial infrastructure is extremely unreliable, lacks any contractual integrity, and is often plagued by systemic corruption. These are dark realities we witnessed firsthand on the trading desk.

So, it was through this hands-on experience on the financial trading front lines, combined with my early network in the tech world (like friends who early on worked on P2P music file-sharing software), that made me extremely sensitive and exposed me to Bitcoin very early. And those early digital trading and risk management technical capabilities later seamlessly migrated into the digital asset space.

Why Bitcoin Made Sense Early On

Host Natalie Brunell: Since you were exposed to this space so early, did you personally invest very early, or did you hold off until traditional financial institutions formally entered and the entire industry became compliant before you started building a position?

Amy Oldenburg:

Actually, no. Funny story—my brother was visiting last week, and we were reminiscing. Around 2012, he excitedly came to me saying he wanted to get a few machines to mine Bitcoin. I directly laughed at him, saying we simply didn't have the kind of outrageously powerful hardware at home 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 an elegant Coinbase app and click a few times in a browser to safely buy and hold Bitcoin. Honestly, if you wanted to buy coins back then, your only option was dealing 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 be fired tomorrow. For me back then, the compliance risk and operational cost were just too high. So, even though I was heavily following and spent an immense amount of time coolly observing its evolution, I was definitely not one of those hardcore miners hunched over computers mining early on.

Host Natalie Brunell: Let's zoom out to a more macro perspective—looking back on your investment experience deeply involved in Emerging Markets, was there any core conclusion that directly corresponds to Bitcoin's later strong rise? Any bloody lesson from emerging markets that made you suddenly realize, 'Oh! This is why Bitcoin makes sense!'?

Amy Oldenburg:

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

On the front lines in East Africa back then, we witnessed firsthand how digital currency and mobile payment infrastructure swept across that land at a mind-numbing speed—the explosive force was truly perception-shattering. And Westerners living in the US at the time couldn't resonate with this change at all because our card system was so mature; Americans simply didn't face the pain points African people did. Even more absurd, African people were running this entire 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 physical banking system is extremely lagging. The vast majority of people at the bottom of the pyramid will never open a bank account in their lifetime, so they have no choice but to fully embrace and rely on mobile money.

I later spent some time in Tanzania. When you walk in the most remote, raw villages without paved roads, without 24/7 electricity, you suddenly see a tiny Vodafone yellow kiosk by the roadside. The stall is as simple as a lemonade stand kids might build, but it has the extremely eye-catching four letters: M-Pesa.

That's where local villagers turn their cash into digital assets on their phones. When you're physically there, seeing how deeply this decentralized digital infrastructure permeates society, seeing these financially marginalized people take it as their only option to change their fate, and the very tangible sense of security it brings these ordinary people, the mental impact is inexpressible.

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

But since mobile digital money arrived, as soon as they close shop, they can immediately deposit cash at a roadside digital point, turning it into encrypted digits on their phone or digital card. When they walk the dark road home empty-handed, they eliminate the potential catastrophe of violent robbery, gaining an absolute, technology-based sense of security they never experienced in traditional financial society.

Don't you see? This underlying concept of finance, assets, and life safety intertwined 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 underlying logic of Bitcoin's early value.

Morgan Stanley Spot Bitcoin ETF

Host Natalie Brunell: So, what exactly catalyzed Morgan Stanley's public move to the forefront—not only publicly expressing support for Bitcoin but even directly launching spot Bitcoin-related products (like access to and distribution of spot Bitcoin ETPs/ETFs)?

Amy Oldenburg:

It's rooted in being "client-driven." At Morgan Stanley, one of the highest core principles the entire company relies on daily to survive and operate is being client-driven. Clients are continuously expressing strong demands, and as a service provider, we naturally have to follow the market.

Of course, limited by the industry's special compliance framework, what we can do has its red lines at different stages. But as the regulatory environment continues to loosen and evolve—even looking at our E*TRADE business—I think before answering this question, it's necessary to quickly outline Morgan Stanley's vast business landscape.

We have several different business divisions: Institutional Securities—what people usually think of as investment banking, sales & trading, and research; then Wealth Management—with several sub-sectors, including financial advisors, which we'll discuss later. We've also made a series of major acquisitions, one being E*TRADE—a self-directed online trading platform that brought us to a completely different client demographic through this technology platform. Then there's our Investment Management division—the product manufacturing arm, 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 diverse businesses, able to mobilize capabilities across multiple divisions simultaneously, is very exciting.

Regarding Bitcoin exposure, we have a Bitcoin ETP, which comes from our Investment Management division. Then there's spot trading, which we are gradually rolling out on E*TRADE now; you can directly buy spot Bitcoin on E*TRADE.

Why Haven't Institutional Investors Fully Committed to Bitcoin?

Host Natalie Brunell: I understand that for an institution as large as Morgan Stanley, launching these things involves passing through many gates—compliance, legal. Can you give us some insider perspective on why it took so long? On one hand, optimists say, 'It's a miracle Bitcoin has penetrated mainstream banks like Morgan Stanley in just sixteen short years.' But on the other hand, radical believers ask, 'Since the trend is here, why aren't mainstream institutions willing to bet everything and fully commit to Bitcoin?'

Amy Oldenburg:

There are a few different issues. First, the outside world often underestimates the extremely stringent systemic regulatory restrictions imposed on us. Here, everyone 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 also has a large-scale asset management business, our entire group is legally structured as a bank holding company. This means Morgan Stanley must adhere to a completely different, much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements belonging to the banking system—because the Federal Reserve looms large over us.

This is precisely one of the reasons why we simply couldn't flexibly launch these precursor crypto products as early as independent asset management peers like BlackRock. You can imagine how frustrating and painful it was for us sitting in the office years ago, watching technology leap forward on the front lines, watching peers rush to launch crypto products one after another—we could only stare at each other, countless times screaming inside, 'Why can't we do this?'

Another interesting point. We actually had a plan a few years ago to roll out spot crypto business on the E*TRADE side. But unfortunately, during 2020, 2021, many of the vendors we did due diligence on, evaluated, even shortlisted, no longer exist. So when we restarted this initiative in 2024, we had to rebuild the entire proposal from scratch; much of the previous work became unusable.

Record Demand for MSBT

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

Amy Oldenburg:

As the product maker, of course you talk up your own product before launch—but honestly, before the code and product actually hit the market and start trading, your heart is completely hanging; no one really knows what will happen.

We received a lot of feedback from Wall Street, both saying 'You must enter this space' and others saying 'Why are you coming? There are already over twenty Bitcoin ETPs on the market, what's different about yours?' We tried our best to differentiate—bringing institutional-grade architecture to this product. We entered the market with a 14 basis point fee, worked hard on the total expense ratio. We also did something on the custody side, partnering with both Coinbase and BNY, being the first in the market to partner with BNY for 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 needs to develop. Because moving from here to more advanced products, that infrastructure, whether BNY, us, or other Wall Street GSIBs, has a lot of work to do 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 run into them at a few events recently, and we've done a lot of work with that team—we were actually a major participant in the issuance of that digital credit product, STRK, so we are very familiar with the underlying logic and mechanics of such assets.

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

I asked a colleague today who's been involved in all the ETP launches, 'What do you think is limiting the community, limiting the financial advisor community from engaging with these products—whether ETPs or STRK or others?' She directly said, '100% education.'

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

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

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

Amy Oldenburg:

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

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 moves in step with high-risk assets like stocks. Honestly, from my personal asset management intuition, I really wish it could shed its skin sooner and behave more like a hard asset with true cross-cycle anti-inflation properties like gold. So, this operational gap between the 'theoretical digital gold' and the 'real-world high-risk asset' is indeed extremely confusing for countless clients and financial advisors.

That said, Morgan Stanley's official access recommendations are indeed 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, since we opened up these allocation recommendations, Bitcoin's chart has actually been in a long-term sideways consolidation, right?

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

Especially when simultaneously dealing with other asset classes; private credit has been hot for the past few years, and the valuation surge in the AI space has also left everyone feeling lost and confused. 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 client in front of them. And many of our clients with significant wealth, some really like innovative things and actively request them; some are content 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 did a round trip from its 2021 highs.' I can understand that. Of course, you need to zoom out, look at the time frame, but what do you think is holding Bitcoin back? We're now in 2026, so many institutions, banks have entered, what exactly do you think is stubbornly holding Bitcoin back? We're now in 2026, so many top institutions, mainstream banks have publicly entered, Strategy even mechanically sweeps up every Monday, why haven't we broken through to a $200,000 peak yet?

Amy Oldenburg:

There isn't a single factor at play here. We tend to get stuck in that black-and-white binary debate: 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. There was indeed a bull run momentum recently, with so many mainstream financial new products launching densely, greatly expanding its global distribution channels. But don't forget, just last year, traditional financial markets experienced an insanely crazy gold and silver super rally, commodity trading was red-hot. Once when talking to a peer, they bluntly told me: 'We've already pulled our attention back from crypto assets; everyone at the bank is now doing intraday commodity trading.' You see, the attention and liquidity of global mainstream capital for asset allocation is being brutally fragmented.

Host Natalie Brunell: So what do you think would 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 takes time. I hate to say it, maybe because I'm a child of the era who experienced the global financial crisis, the tech crisis, 9/11, even the COVID outbreak. Crisis events completely change our way of thinking, and sometimes we never return to the old ways. I'm reluctant to say it might need a crisis. Sometimes I also think it might be a 'slow-grinding crisis,' less dramatic, not as intense as COVID or the global financial crisis, but I'm not sure. Maybe it really needs that kind of event: we break the existing system, and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact.

For me, the evolution of digital asset activity 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 entire country collapses, you're still fine because the ecosystem and blockchain will be maintained by supporters elsewhere in the world. And now we're building a lot of digital asset things in a very centralized way. 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 this concept of 'agentic.' We might one day return to the origin of proof-of-work by truly recognizing its value: when our inboxes are destroyed by AI agents, flooded with spam, fakes, indistinguishable from real, we'll discover that a large part of Bitcoin technology early on was to solve the spam inbox problem. We might really have to step back and say, 'This 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? Might really go back to Bitcoin's origin story.

Corporate Balance Sheet

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

Amy Oldenburg:

Certainly, not bearing such heavy burdens in capital treatment. And I think banks aren't not doing it because they dislike Bitcoin, but because we also have a business to run. If there are assets more efficient from a capital treatment or regulatory perspective, of course we prioritize those. This isn't an anti-Bitcoin stance; it just needs an environment that also supports the utilization of such assets from a collateral perspective, trading, and ecosystem perspective.

It's not even limited to Bitcoin. Today we were in meetings discussing tokenization and tokenized stocks. Of course, the tokenization topic is hot again. But if no one actually needs tokenized stocks, we have little motivation to spend so much money building them. Of course we can prepare, can provide support, but ultimately, if traditional assets are where lending demand is, we can do traditional securities lending, can provide services around traditional clients. If demand comes, and there's demand for tokenized assets, we'll do that too.

The same logic applies to Bitcoin. If we can use these assets in the same way, can use them as collateral, without adding balance sheet burden, we're more motivated to spend more time going down this 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 believe we'll see sustained, moderate adoption growth. I don't think we'll see some magical J-curve and suddenly take off by 2027. More likely, it will be similar to what we've experienced before: more participants continuously entering, they get educated, slowly understand, then prices rise, and we slowly climb like that.

I might be too jaded from too much experience, not making wild predictions. Bitcoin at a million dollars? That's great, I see nothing impossible about it. Given everything I've seen in my life, I believe anything is possible. But I also think any event that extreme requires time, because if something that extreme happens, it usually means another extreme event has occurred.

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

What More People Should Know About Bitcoin

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

Amy Oldenburg:

As I said at that Vegas event, I think the biggest misunderstanding is, when a series of crypto assets are rolled 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, the narrative seems to have condensed to 'They're just crypto assets,' especially seeing more centralized platforms launching. You do keep the focus differentiation well; you focus on Bitcoin, but I do think we need to spend more time discussing these differences.

Winner-Take-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 experience in tech, there's a 'winner-take-all' mentality in the tech world.

Think about NVIDIA. I can't remember when it was founded, but back when I was on the emerging markets team, we invested in NVIDIA, treating it as a gaming investment because we were following the Asian gaming theme. NVIDIA was making GPUs back then, and our experience during that period was quite painful, with few positive results for many years. You hear Jensen Huang now in various speeches reminiscing about the hardships, how they were on the brink of bankruptcy several times early on. The market didn't buy into them back then; as a public company that listed too early, they endured an extremely long and dark period.

That 'winner-take-all' culture you see in tech and many tech-related fields doesn't fit with financial services at all. The essence of financial services is redundancy and multiple participants. Look at investment banking; every IPO has many banks competing, but they're all on the same issuance. In the asset management industry, no single asset manager has over 3% market share; it's extremely fragmented. Even with the 'too big to fail' super giants, scale effects exist, but the overall industry is still highly diversified.

In wealth management, we are indeed the largest in the US, but the second largest is 30% smaller. Looking globally, it's even more fragmented; Europe is extremely 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—multiple participants and redundancy vs. winner-take-all—are hard to match. Because we constantly find that when looking for technology vendors to support our business, often only one can do it. We run RFP processes, usually starting with a list of over ten, filtering to five finalists, then to 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 really is only one, at most two, that can meet those non-negotiable hard requirements.

Host Natalie Brunell: So what do you think this lack of 'biodiversity' is due to?

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 watched and listened, thinking all along: 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; it's about network effects, not revenue.'

Addressing Skepticism Towards Large Banks

Host Natalie Brunell: Part of my audience, whenever I mention institutions, ETFs, these financial products, instantly bristles. Bitcoin has a cypherpunk spirit—it was designed to disintermediate, eliminate counterparty risk; it's the people's money. What would you say to those who oppose institutions entering Bitcoin, 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 empathize deeply. I spent the better part of my career in emerging markets, where the people's 'distrust' of the traditional official financial system isn't some abstract textbook theory; it's a bleeding, harsh reality every single day. This is absolutely not 'Oh, that was twenty years ago, I vaguely remember'—look at Russia right now, look at Ukraine, those friends and peers we worked with on the trading desk, who were frozen out overnight, even completely lost all their assets in physical banks. To save their life's 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 wiped to zero in a sudden upheaval. This isn't 20 years ago, not 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, I see the endless bad actors and egregious blowups in this industry over the past few years, and I feel extremely pained—because these centralized scams directly scared away countless people seeking financial sovereignty, severely hindering the spread of global consensus. But on the other hand, the cypherpunk philosophy and concepts have tremendous value.

We need tools to continue scaling, to allow people to interact with it, but those tools haven't truly arrived. What arrived are highly centralized, very easy-to-use tools that look exactly like all the tools consumers are already used to. I don't want to be picky, but the user experience is just poor; it's improved somewhat now but still not sufficiently evolved.

One thing that really opened my eyes was when we launched the ETP, and last September the SEC approved the ability to transfer spot Bitcoin in-kind 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 indeed need more services. Many have not only built wealth but continue to believe in this entire concept, but you still need to live your life, manage life's various events, whether borrowing, buying property, sending remittances, ensuring your estate can pass to the next generation. Some have tried building these businesses; some succeeded. I'm not saying nothing exists out there; some tools have been built very successfully. But sometimes handing it over to a centralized institution is just simpler; I'm afraid from a security angle, and I'm afraid from an estate management angle too.

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 that ETP's value, 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 life transactions. For estate management, placing it on a wealth platform is indeed more convenient than self-custody.

But it's still inside an ETP. Some people say to me, 'I have Bitcoin exposure, so if something goes wrong, I have Bitcoin.' I say, 'No, you don't have Bitcoin.' You hold shares of a Bitcoin ETP, providing you with price exposure to Bitcoin. So I think the education is multi-layered: First layer, what is Bitcoin? Second layer, do you know the difference between holding spot Bitcoin and holding an ETP? Third layer, do you know the difference between self-custodying Bitcoin and holding it on a centralized platform? Anyone with exposure during the FTX period, holding assets on a centralized exchange, 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 said is indeed right. On one hand, these more traditional financial tools do unlock liquidity; people want to use them for down payments, borrow against Bitcoin as collateral for life's important milestones. But what fascinates me is the optionality; this is the first bearer instrument in history you can self-custody, memorize in your head. In the worst-case scenario, you can flee elsewhere. 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 cypherpunk-era question; that philosophy is fine; they should continue doing that. I hope those people keep doing it; I hope that part of it exists for a long time. At the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas this year, I noticed the atmosphere was different from the 2021 conference in Miami's Wynwood; that very deep exchange of self-sovereign philosophy was less this time. Maybe it's the conference's own evolution, maybe because more centralized platforms appeared, maybe because people like me, from Morgan Stanley, also showed up. 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 something we haven't covered you'd like to add?

Amy Oldenburg:

We're still in the early stages. Seeing debates like quantum computing versus Bitcoin—'will quantum end everything'—and that we're still arguing over some very passive products is indeed somewhat 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 micro-payments—all these will continue to influence what the future environment looks like. So I think digital assets is a very long road, and I'm very happy to dedicate the next phase of my career to this field because I think we'll be doing it for quite a long time.