J.P. Morgan Executive: It Would Not Be Surprising for Bitcoin to Reach $1 Million in Five Years, but a Crisis Would Be Needed as a Catalyst

Organized & Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

Guest: Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy at Morgan Stanley

Host: Natalie Brunell

Podcast source: Natalie Brunell

When Will Bitcoin Reach a New All-Time High? A Wall Street Insider Explains

Broadcast date: June 10, 2026

Morgan Stanley manages trillions of dollars in assets and is now introducing Bitcoin to its clients—Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy, revealed a striking contrast in this conversation: MSBT set a record for the bank’s ETF debut on its first day, yet most financial advisors still hesitate to recommend it to clients, as Bitcoin’s price has essentially stagnated since their recommendations. She doesn’t believe the next major surge will come from a new product or policy利好, but rather from a transformative event that shatters the traditional financial system. She isn’t surprised by the possibility of Bitcoin reaching $1 million within five years, but she hopes the ascent happens more gradually.

Technological Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

• Each stage of my growth was accompanied by some technological shift that seemed incredibly obscure at the time—and even faced massive skepticism online—yet only today can I clearly see how the entire historical puzzle has come together.
• The veteran retail traders and seasoned traders who constantly traded against me back then stuck with me through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial storm together, and it was precisely the core among them who later became some of the earliest hardcore enthusiasts to buy Bitcoin.
• The earliest advocates and power users of Bitcoin came not only from Silicon Valley’s tech circles but also significantly 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 from the beginning

• In underdeveloped markets, the traditional physical banking system is extremely outdated, and the vast majority of low-income individuals never open a bank account in their lifetime, so they fully rely on and embrace mobile money.
• You’re in a small village where electricity isn’t available 24/7 and the roads are unpaved, yet there’s a tiny Vodafone kiosk, like a lemonade stand, with a sign reading M-Pesa—that’s where you load cash onto your phone.
• Because we have deeply engaged with so many emerging markets, we understand why people in those regions have compelling reasons to embrace decentralization—where traditional financial infrastructure is extremely unreliable, devoid of contractual integrity, and often plagued by severe systemic corruption, all of which we witnessed firsthand on the trading floor.

Why aren't institutional investors fully investing in Bitcoin?

• Our entire group is legally structured as a bank holding company, which means we must comply with far stricter capital adequacy and risk control requirements specific to the banking system—because the Federal Reserve is directly overseeing us.

MSBT demand reaches record levels

• You当然会为自己的产品叫好，但直到它真正上线，你才真正知道会发生什么。结果让很多人意外。
• Combining GSIB-level issuance with GSIB-level custody is our first target for the market, as well as our way to understand what else the ecosystem still needs to develop.

Will Morgan Stanley issue digital credit?

• I know there’s something there in digital credit—but most people haven’t even figured out Bitcoin yet, let alone more advanced products on top of it.
• Education is what limits communities and financial advisors from accessing these products.
• Some products have very appealing elements, but there’s always something that keeps them from coming together fully—kind of like BlackBerry’s early story.

Advisor Gap: Why Isn’t Everyone Recommending Bitcoin?

• If we had made our recommendation at $10,000 or $15,000 and it later rose to $100,000, the momentum would naturally have been behind us—but interestingly, since the recommendation, we’ve essentially been trading within a range.
• Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to select appropriate assets for their current clients. Not every client is a growth investor.

What are the reasons for Bitcoin's development being hindered?

• We always get stuck in black-or-white debates: Will Bitcoin succeed or fail? But we live in a very complex world where various narratives are intertwined, diverting attention and allocation.
• Global mainstream capital's attention and liquidity in asset allocation have been brutally divided.
• I don't want to say this, but perhaps a crisis really is needed—we've shattered the existing system, and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact.

Company balance sheet

• Banks don't hold Bitcoin because they dislike it, but because there are more efficient asset options available—if capital regulatory conditions don't improve, we'll focus our efforts on more favorable assets.
• If no one truly needs tokenized stocks, there’s no reason for us to spend much on it—we’ll do it when demand arises. The same logic applies to Bitcoin.

The Future of Bitcoin

• I don’t expect to see a magical J-curve suddenly taking off by 2027. More likely, we’ll continue climbing slowly, with more participants gradually entering, learning, and gaining understanding over time.
• Bitcoin to one million dollars? That’s great—I don’t see anything impossible about it. Given everything I’ve seen in my lifetime, I believe anything is possible.

Winner-takes-all technology and redundant finance: The future of the industry

• That "winner-takes-all" culture, which you see in tech and many technology-related fields, is completely at odds with financial services, whose essence is redundancy and multiple participants.
• When we conduct an RFP, we start by screening more than ten companies and ultimately hope to have three top candidates to choose from—but in the tech field, there’s often only one, or at most two, that truly meet our core requirements.

Addressing concerns about major banks

• In emerging markets, the public’s distrust of traditional official financial systems is not an abstract theory written in textbooks—it’s a harsh, everyday reality marked by suffering.
• From the perspective of a die-hard Bitcoin believer, taking spot Bitcoin and putting it into a traditional financial institution’s ETP is seen by many as heresy—but it’s happening on a scale I never anticipated.
• Holding ETP shares does not mean you own Bitcoin—you have price exposure. This needs to be repeatedly emphasized.

Host Natalie Brunell: Today’s guest is Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy at Morgan Stanley. Amy, I’d love to hear your story of how you became involved with Bitcoin, as well as your remarkable journey over the past twenty-plus years at Morgan Stanley.

Amy Oldenburg:

I’ve been at Morgan Stanley for twenty-six years, though it wasn’t originally part of my plan. I grew up in a midwestern small town in Ohio. Interestingly—just like you asked me earlier before the show: “How on earth did you get here? How did you end up on this wild journey into digital assets and Bitcoin?”

I’m a Generation Xer too, and I completely relate to your experiences. Sometimes when I see those online memes about what it was like growing up in the 80s and 90s, I realize how deeply technology had already begun subtly reshaping us from the earliest stages of our lives. I remember being seven or eight, spending every day in the basement with my cousins playing Atari and the NES; when Super Mario Bros. came out, we were utterly obsessed. It feels like every major milestone in my life has coincided with some groundbreaking technological wave.

One Christmas, my dad bought us a Tandy computer, and we started tinkering with the earliest computer games—it felt utterly incredible at the time. Then technology kept racing forward. In high school, we were still learning basic typing in the computer lab, but by college, technology had begun to deeply integrate into our daily lives.

I remember back then a professor got early access to BlackBerry, and suddenly our entire marketing class became early adopters. We sat in class, completely baffled about what the thing was even for—it had no apps at all, just a brick of hardware. We joked: “Alright, what’s the difference between this and a high school pager? Sure, it can send letters and numbers, but none of our friends had one—who are we even sending messages to?” Later, it evolved into versions with its iconic full keyboard and reached the absurd point where everyone had one—only to be abruptly rendered obsolete by time. And that’s exactly what happened.

What’s even more interesting is my college major. I was majoring in accounting, but the school had a rule that accounting majors couldn’t go abroad for exchange programs. At the time, all I wanted was to escape Ohio—anywhere farther away, even if it meant being sent to an international market across the ocean, I’d have been happy. Since I couldn’t go overseas, I settled for the next best thing: the school had a domestic exchange program in San Francisco. Since I was studying in New York at the time, in 1999 I packed my bags and headed to San Francisco—only to arrive right in the middle of the wildest dot-com bubble.

Back then, I was young and had no idea how wild the world around me truly was. In Silicon Valley, I started working at an internet startup the very next day, primarily helping Fortune 500 companies build websites. After a two-month paid internship, I dropped my accounting major entirely—even abandoned my major altogether—because the sensation was so overwhelming: the technological transformation unfolding before me would profoundly disrupt the future.

Back then, we traveled with our company to various industry conferences. At the time, Google was just a small startup that could only hand out tiny slips of paper to recruit people, which read: "If interested, visit our Craigslist page to apply for a job at Google." We raised an eyebrow and thought: "Google? What a weird name? This business model makes no sense—who would use it to search for things? It’ll never succeed."

So you see, every stage of my growth was accompanied by some technological shift that, at the time, seemed incredibly obscure and faced massive skepticism online—yet only today can I clearly see how the entire historical puzzle has come together.

As for how I later entered the digital assets and Bitcoin space—I actually joined Morgan Stanley after the dot-com bubble burst. I stayed at the startup in San Francisco when the bubble popped, and was later transferred back to the New York headquarters full-time. But everyone knew the environment had completely collapsed—we were even forced to withdraw our S-1 filing and never went public, followed by two brutal rounds of internal layoffs. I had to immediately activate Plan B because I needed to pay rent—and I was absolutely not going back to Ohio.

That’s exactly when I accidentally ended up at Morgan Stanley. A close friend of mine worked in HR at Morgan Stanley, and she came to me saying, “I know you’re not really into traditional finance right now—you’re fully focused on tech. But I have a lot of open positions that need filling. If you know anyone looking for a job or interested in interviewing, feel free to refer them.” I thought about it for a moment and decided, why not give it a try myself? At least it would give me a backup option.

That’s how I crossed over into Morgan Stanley’s emerging markets team. The aftershocks of the Asian financial crisis (1997) had yet to fade, and the Mexican Tequila Crisis (1994) had only just passed—emerging markets were in shambles. The team I joined went through several rounds of leadership changes within just a few years. At the same time, we were clearly feeling the severe impact of the dot-com bubble burst on financial assets—around 2000 or 2001. Even more dramatically, exactly nine months after I joined, the 9/11 attacks occurred. Those were days of one crisis following another, while underlying technological transformations were simultaneously accelerating rapidly.

During my time at Morgan Stanley, I spent several years on the trading floor, specializing in programmatic trading and foreign exchange trading in emerging markets. The seasoned traders and veterans who traded against me daily back then stuck with me through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial storm together, and it was precisely the core group among them who later became some of the earliest hardcore investors to buy Bitcoin.

The earliest evangelists and heavy users of Bitcoin came not only from Silicon Valley’s tech circles but also significantly 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 deeply engaged with too many emerging markets, we understand well why people in those regions have compelling reasons to embrace decentralization—where traditional financial infrastructure is extremely unreliable, devoid of contractual integrity, and often plagued by severe systemic corruption, all of which we witnessed firsthand on the trading floor.

It was precisely through my hands-on experience in financial transactions, combined with the network I built early in the tech industry—such as friends who had already ventured into peer-to-peer music file-sharing software—that I became acutely aware of and early exposed to Bitcoin. The digital transaction skills and resilience technologies I developed back then seamlessly transitioned into the digital assets space.

Host Natalie Brunell: Since you were involved in this space so early, did you invest right away, or did you hold off until later, when traditional financial institutions officially entered and the industry became regulated?

Amy Oldenburg:

Actually, there isn’t any. Funny enough, last week my brother came over to visit, and we were both reflecting on it—around 2012, he excitedly came running to me saying he wanted to set up a few machines to mine Bitcoin. I laughed right at him, telling him we didn’t have anywhere near the kind of high-performance hardware needed to build a mining rig.

And you have to understand, back then, the crypto environment was cutthroat and extremely dangerous—nothing like today, where you simply download a sleek, user-friendly Coinbase app and click a few buttons in your browser to safely buy or sell Bitcoin. To be honest, if you wanted to buy crypto back then, your only option was dealing with sketchy operations like Mt. Gox. At the time, I was working at Morgan Stanley, and I kept thinking to myself: if I even touched this stuff, I’d probably be fired the next day. For me back then, the compliance risks and operational costs were simply too high. So although I closely followed the space and spent countless hours observing its evolution from the sidelines, I was certainly not one of those hardcore early adopters hunched over their computers mining Bitcoin.

Host Natalie Brunell: Let’s broaden the perspective—looking back on your years of investing in emerging markets, was there a key insight that directly aligns with Bitcoin’s subsequent rise? Was there a hard-earned lesson from emerging markets that made you suddenly realize: “Ah, so that’s why Bitcoin makes sense—it’s rooted here!”

Amy Oldenburg:

Yes, and this intuition was extremely strong. Going back to 2007, just before the global financial crisis, those today focused on fintech are likely well familiar with M-Pesa—the benchmark mobile wallet in Kenya—and the rapid, untamed growth of mobile payments across Africa and other emerging markets. But few know that our Morgan Stanley team was already deeply involved and invested in the IPO of Safaricom, its parent company, around 2006 and 2007.

At the time, on the front lines of East Africa, we witnessed digital currencies and mobile payment infrastructure sweeping across the region at a breathtaking pace—this kind of explosive growth was truly paradigm-shifting. Meanwhile, Westerners living in the United States were completely unable to relate to this transformation, as our banking systems were already highly mature, and Americans simply did not face the same pain points as people in Africa. Even more astonishingly, Africans were running this entire digital financial ecosystem on the most basic, non-smart flip phones—this was far from the era of smartphones.

In underdeveloped markets, the traditional physical banking system is extremely outdated, and the vast majority of low-income individuals never open a bank account in their lifetime, so they fully rely on and embrace mobile money.

Later, I spent some time in Tanzania. When walking through remote villages where even main roads weren’t paved and electricity wasn’t available 24/7, you’d suddenly spot a small yellow kiosk by the roadside—Vodafone’s humble little booth, so basic it looked like a lemonade stand built by village children—yet emblazoned across it in bold, unmistakable letters: M-Pesa.

That’s where local villagers convert their physical cash into digital assets on their phones. When you stand there in person and witness firsthand how deeply this decentralized digital infrastructure has penetrated society, see how people on the financial margins view this as their only path to changing their fate, and feel the tangible sense of security it brings to ordinary people, the emotional impact is beyond words.

Try to empathize with the scene: African women who daily sell vegetables, bread, or run small stalls to make a living. In the past, when they packed up their goods and walked home at night along the road back to their villages, they carried all the heavy cash they had just earned on their person. In areas with poor security, this was like walking around with a ticking time bomb.

But since the advent of mobile digital currency, as soon as they finish selling, they can immediately deposit their cash into a nearby digital kiosk, converting it into a string of encrypted numbers on their phones or digital cards. As they walk home in the dark with empty hands, they eliminate the ever-present threat of violent robbery, gaining a sense of absolute technological security never before experienced in traditional financial systems.

Have you noticed? This fundamental concept, intertwining finance, assets, and life safety, is completely on a different wavelength from ordinary Western investors or Wall Street bankers living sterile lives in offices in Chicago or New York. And this is precisely the most core, fundamental aspect of Bitcoin’s early value logic.

Host Natalie Brunell: So, what exactly catalyzed Morgan Stanley’s public emergence—not only openly expressing support for Bitcoin, but also directly launching spot Bitcoin-related products to the market, such as access to and distribution of spot Bitcoin ETPs/ETFs?

Amy Oldenburg:

It all comes down to "client-driven." At Morgan Stanley, one of the company’s most fundamental principles, upon which it relies and operates daily, is being client-driven. Clients are consistently expressing strong demands, and as a service provider, we naturally respond to the market.

Of course, due to the industry’s unique compliance framework, the actions we can take are subject to clear boundaries at different stages. However, as the regulatory environment continues to loosen and evolve—even when looking at our own ETRADE business—I believe it’s important to first provide a quick overview of Morgan Stanley’s extensive business landscape before addressing this question.

We have several distinct business divisions: Institutional Securities—commonly understood as investment banking, sales and trading, and research; then Wealth Management—which includes several sub-segments, such as financial advisors, which we’ll discuss later. We’ve also made a series of major acquisitions, one of which was E*TRADE—an online self-directed trading platform that introduced us to an entirely different customer base. Additionally, we have our Asset Management division—the department responsible for creating products, ranging from corporate pensions and sovereign wealth funds to mutual funds and ETFs.

These products are distributed not only on our own wealth platform—which is just one channel—but also across the U.S. and globally through relationships with other intermediaries and banks. It’s exciting to have such a diversified business and the ability to mobilize multiple teams simultaneously.

Regarding Bitcoin exposure, we offer Bitcoin ETPs, which come from our asset management division. We are also gradually launching spot trading on ETRADE, allowing you to purchase spot Bitcoin directly on ETRADE.

Host Natalie Brunell: I understand that for an institution as large as Morgan Stanley, launching such products involves navigating numerous hurdles—compliance, legal. Could you share some insights into why it took so long? On one hand, optimists might say, “In just sixteen years, Bitcoin making its way into a mainstream bank like Morgan Stanley is already a miracle.” On the other hand, fervent believers might ask, “If the tailwinds are here, why aren’t mainstream institutions fully committing their entire resources to Bitcoin?”

Amy Oldenburg:

There are several different issues. First, external parties often underestimate the extremely stringent systemic regulatory constraints imposed upon us. Here, it’s essential to clarify a key concept: the underlying architecture of Morgan Stanley is fundamentally different from that of BlackRock.

BlackRock is a pure, independent asset management firm, while Morgan Stanley, although we also have a large asset management business, is legally structured as a bank holding company. This means that Morgan Stanley must adhere to a much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements specific to the banking system—because directly above us stands the Federal Reserve.

This is precisely why we were unable to launch these前置加密 products as flexibly and early as independent asset managers like BlackRock. Imagine how frustrating and agonizing it was back then, sitting in our offices watching frontline tech companies surge ahead while our competitors raced to launch crypto products—we could only stare at each other, endlessly wondering why we couldn’t do the same.

Another interesting point: We actually developed a plan several years ago to launch spot crypto trading on E*TRADE. However, unfortunately, many of the vendors we due-diligenced, evaluated, and even shortlisted during 2020 and 2021 no longer exist. So when we restarted this initiative in 2024, we had to rebuild the entire plan from scratch—much of our prior work was no longer usable.

Host Natalie Brunell: The issuance of MSBT set the best first-day record for ETFs in Morgan Stanley’s history. What did you observe in terms of actual demand?

Amy Oldenburg:

As the creator of the product, you naturally champion it vigorously before launch—but honestly, until the code and product are truly released to the market, you’re left wondering what will really happen.

We’ve received considerable feedback from Wall Street, with some saying, “You must enter this space,” and others asking, “Why enter? There are already around twenty Bitcoin ETPs on the market—what makes your product different?” We’ve done our utmost to differentiate ourselves by bringing institutional-grade architecture to this product. We entered the market with a fee of 14 basis points, placing significant emphasis on reducing the total expense ratio. We’ve also innovated at the custody level by partnering with both Coinbase and BNY Mellon, becoming the first in the market to collaborate with BNY Mellon for ETP custody.

Therefore, combining GSIB-level issuance with GSIB-level custody is our first target for market entry, and it’s also how we aim to understand what else the ecosystem still needs to develop. Because if we move beyond this toward more advanced products, significant work remains—whether by BNY, us, or other Wall Street GSIBs—to build the infrastructure necessary to truly launch and sustain a 24/7 flywheel and continue advancing in this market.

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

Amy Oldenburg:

Great question. Over the past few months, I’ve encountered them at several events, and we’ve done a lot of work with their team—we’re one of the primary participants in issuing the STRK digital credit product, so we have an in-depth understanding of the underlying logic and operational mechanics of this type of asset.

Going back to the story I mentioned earlier—I feel that people struggle to truly understand where it fits within the bigger picture. When I spoke with financial advisors, some were very knowledgeable about it, but a large portion hadn’t even grasped Bitcoin yet, let alone more advanced products on top of it. There’s still a great deal of education needed. Moreover, these products have unique characteristics—they don’t fit neatly into traditional categories, lack the ratings that some investors are accustomed to, and behave differently. How do we help people understand them?

Today, I also asked a colleague who has been involved in all ETP issuances: “What do you think is limiting the community and financial advisors from accessing these products—whether ETPs, STRK, or others?” She immediately replied, “100% it’s education.”

Some elements of these products are very compelling, but there’s always just a little something missing that prevents it from coming together fully—somewhat like the BlackBerry story. I know there’s something there, but it hasn’t quite clicked into place yet. Still, I believe it will happen eventually; it just needs more time.

Host Natalie Brunell: You just mentioned financial advisors. As I understand, Morgan Stanley has now officially permitted a tactical allocation of 2% to 4% in Bitcoin. But as you said, adoption and recommendations by wealth advisors are lagging far behind the intense demand from end clients.

Amy Oldenburg:

That’s a great question. We’re working to understand the psychological factors behind this, which are just as important as the financial ones. Our recommendations are tailored for moderately aggressive portfolios, not for all clients, but specifically for those whose risk preferences align with this approach.

From a macroeconomic perspective, even though we’ve recently seen global inflation continuing to rise, Bitcoin’s price has moved downward. Its actual market behavior still closely mirrors that of other high-risk assets like stocks. To be honest, from my personal asset management intuition, I truly hope Bitcoin will soon evolve to behave more like gold—a true hard asset with proven cross-cycle inflation-hedging properties. This disconnect between Bitcoin’s theoretical identity as “digital gold” and its practical reality as a high-risk asset has left countless clients and financial advisors deeply confused.

That said, Morgan Stanley’s official allocation recommendations are clearly stated on record—some balanced portfolios range from 0% to 2%, while more aggressive public growth portfolios range from 2% to 4%. But here’s the subtle point: since we introduced these allocation recommendations, Bitcoin’s price has essentially been range-bound over the long term, correct?

If Morgan Stanley had issued its official recommendation when Bitcoin was at a massive bottom of $10,000 or $15,000, and it subsequently surged all the way to $100,000, the extraordinary profit potential and market momentum would naturally have pushed all advisors to move forward. But interestingly, since the recommendation, we’ve essentially been trading in a range, making people more hesitant about its future direction—making the psychological battle particularly difficult.

In particular, you must also manage relationships across other asset classes—private credit has been extremely popular in recent years, and the soaring valuations in the AI sector have left everyone feeling confused and uncertain. As you help clients navigate these dynamics, keep in mind: not every client is a growth investor. Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to identify suitable assets for their current clients. Many of our clients with significant wealth have very different preferences—some are drawn to innovative opportunities and actively seek them out, while others prefer to keep their assets in more reliable instruments, prioritizing steady returns and capital preservation.

Host Natalie Brunell: I’ve heard it said that “Bitcoin has essentially retraced from its 2021 high.” I get that. Of course, you need to take a long-term view and consider timeframes—but what do you think is holding Bitcoin back? We’re now in 2026, and so many institutions and banks have entered the space. Why, exactly, is Bitcoin still being held back? We’re in 2026, with top institutions and major banks openly entering the market—Strategy even mechanically buys aggressively every single Monday—so why haven’t we yet reached the $200,000 peak?

Amy Oldenburg:

It’s certainly not driven by a single factor. We often fall into the trap of binary debates—will Bitcoin achieve ultimate success or collapse to zero? Is it digital gold or a bubble? But the reality is that we live in a world of incredibly complex博弈 dynamics. Recently, there was indeed a bullish momentum, with a surge of mainstream financial products launching in quick succession, significantly expanding its global distribution channels. But don’t forget that last year, traditional financial markets experienced an extremely wild rally in gold and silver, with commodity trading reaching fever pitch. I once spoke with a colleague who bluntly told me: “We’ve pulled our focus away from crypto assets—now everyone in investment banking is chasing commodities intraday trading.” As you can see, global mainstream capital’s attention and liquidity are being brutally fragmented across asset classes.

Host Natalie Brunell: What do you think would serve as a catalyst to reignite Bitcoin and better align it with the role many Bitcoiners envision for it—a neutral store of value?

Amy Oldenburg:

I think it will take time. I don’t want to say this, but perhaps because I’m a child of an era that experienced the global financial crisis, the tech crash, 9/11, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, crises fundamentally change the way we think—and sometimes we never return to our old ways of thinking. I don’t want to suggest that it might require a crisis, but sometimes I wonder if it could be a “slow-moving crisis,” less dramatic than COVID or the global financial collapse, but I’m not sure. Perhaps what’s truly needed is an event like that: one that shatters the existing system, leaving Bitcoin as the only thing left intact.

I also find the evolution of digital asset activity fascinating. My journey began more on the Bitcoin side, where I believe in decentralization—especially from the perspective of emerging markets: even if power goes out or an entire country collapses, you’re still fine because the ecosystem and blockchain are maintained by supporters elsewhere in the world. Now, however, we’re building a lot of digital asset infrastructure in highly centralized ways. So I wonder if it will take something breaking before people return to discussions about decentralization.

Last week, I discussed the concept of "agentic" at an event—we might one day return to the original premise of proof of work, precisely because we finally recognize its true value: when our inboxes are overwhelmed by AI agents flooding us with spam, fakes, and messages indistinguishable from reality, we’ll realize that much of Bitcoin’s early technology was designed to solve the problem of email spam. We may truly have to step back and say, “This is essential.” My inbox is being destroyed by messages from agents; I can’t tell which transactions are real or fake—how do you verify them? We might genuinely be circling back to Bitcoin’s origin story.

Host Natalie Brunell: Many projects and tokens claim to be decentralized but are in fact highly centralized and more speculative. So what conditions would need to be met for U.S. banks to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets?

Amy Oldenburg:

It’s certainly true that we don’t want to bear such a heavy burden in capital processing. I believe banks aren’t avoiding Bitcoin because we dislike it, but because we also need to run a business. If there are assets that are more efficient from a capital processing or regulatory standpoint, we naturally prioritize those. This isn’t an anti-Bitcoin stance—it’s simply about creating an environment where such an asset can be effectively utilized, both in terms of collateral and within trading and ecosystem frameworks.

It’s not even limited to Bitcoin—we’re meeting today to discuss tokenization and tokenized stocks. Of course, the topic of tokenization is currently trending. But if there’s no real demand for tokenized stocks, it’s hard to justify spending so much on it. We can certainly prepare and offer support, but ultimately, if the demand for borrowing lies in traditional assets, we can still provide traditional securities lending and serve our traditional clients. If demand for tokenized assets emerges, we’ll be ready to meet it as well.

The same logic applies to Bitcoin. If we can use these assets in the same way—as collateral—without increasing balance sheet burden, we’ll have greater motivation to invest more time in this path.

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

Amy Oldenburg:

I believe growth will continue. By 2030, I expect to see steady, gradual adoption growth. I don’t anticipate a sudden magical J-curve or a dramatic spike by 2027. More likely, it will resemble what we’ve experienced before: more participants gradually entering, becoming educated, slowly understanding the space, driving price increases, and helping us climb steadily over time.

I’ve probably seen too much and am too realistic to make wild predictions. Bitcoin reaching one million dollars? That’s great—I don’t see anything impossible about it. Given everything I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, I believe anything is possible. But I also feel that anything that extreme would take time, because if something that extreme were to happen, it usually means another extreme event has occurred.

So I believe a gentle upward trend would be ideal—we want asset stability. One criticism of Bitcoin is its volatility, so I hope it becomes more stable in the future, even if some volatility remains; ideally, it would be more range-bound.

Host Natalie Brunell: Returning to the education gap, what would you like more people, including Morgan Stanley’s clients, to understand about Bitcoin? What are they currently not understanding or misunderstanding?

Amy Oldenburg:

I said this back in Vegas: I think the biggest misconception is that when a range of crypto assets—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP—come into view, everyone assumes, "They’re all just crypto assets; they’re all the same." But they’re not the same—they’re very different. Each has its own unique characteristics. I believe we should spend more time in the future discussing these differences—but right now, the narrative has narrowed to "they’re just crypto assets," especially as more centralized platforms launch. You’ve consistently done a great job of maintaining focus—you’ve centered on Bitcoin—but I truly feel we need to dedicate more time to exploring these distinctions.

Host Natalie Brunell: I think there are also problems within the industry itself—too much infighting among insiders.

Amy Oldenburg:

I often wonder why things happen the way they do—from user experience and brand psychology to the broader tech landscape—returning to my early experiences in the tech industry, there’s been a “winner-takes-all” mentality in the tech world.

Think of NVIDIA—I can’t recall when it was founded, but when I was on the emerging markets team, we invested in NVIDIA, initially viewing it as a gaming play since we were focused on the gaming theme in Asia. At the time, NVIDIA was working on GPUs, and our experience during that period was extremely difficult, with no positive returns for many years. Now, when you listen to Jensen Huang recounting those hardships in his various speeches, he talks about how they nearly went bankrupt multiple times in the early days. The market simply didn’t buy into them back then; as an over-early public company, they endured an incredibly long and dark period of struggle.

That "winner-takes-all" culture is common in tech and many technology-related fields, but it’s completely at odds with the nature of financial services, which is built on redundancy and numerous participants. Look at investment banking: multiple banks compete for each IPO, yet they all participate in the same offering. In asset management, no single firm holds more than 3% market share—it’s extremely fragmented. Even the "too big to fail" giants, despite benefiting from economies of scale, still operate within an industry that remains highly competitive and diverse.

In wealth management, we are indeed the largest in the U.S., but the second-largest player is 30% smaller than us. Globally, the market is extremely fragmented—highly fragmented in Europe and similarly so in Asia, where each country has its own structure and approach to wealth management, often through insurance companies, shaped by regional savings incentives.

These two cultures—many participants and redundancy versus winner-takes-all—are hard to reconcile. Because time and again, we find that when seeking technology service providers to support our business, often only one company can deliver. We run RFP processes, typically starting with a list of a dozen or more, narrowing it down to five final candidates, then to three, hoping you can still pick the true winner from among those three—and hoping all three are solid options. But technology doesn’t always work that way; sometimes, only one—or at most two—companies can meet your non-negotiable hard requirements.

Host Natalie Brunell: So what do you think is the cause of this lack of "biodiversity"?

Amy Oldenburg:

I think this is determined by the environment—the financial services environment isn’t backed by VCs; we exist, survive, and thrive on our own revenue, whereas technology often relies on an investor base that is constantly fighting for survival. I remember having dinner with a serial entrepreneur in San Francisco about twenty years ago—he had already sold one company and was building his second, which was already very successful. As I listened to him, I kept thinking to myself: What’s his revenue model? I couldn’t figure it out at all. Finally, I couldn’t help asking, “So what’s your revenue model?” He was stunned: “What do you mean, revenue model? Don’t you understand? I’m building a network—it’s about network effects, not revenue.”

Host Natalie Brunell: Some of my viewers immediately become skeptical whenever I mention institutions, ETFs, or these financial products. Bitcoin carries a cypherpunk spirit—it was designed to be decentralized, to eliminate counterparty risk, to be the people’s money. What would you say to those who oppose institutional involvement in Bitcoin and are fundamentally skeptical of everything you’re doing, especially someone who has spent over two decades working within large banking institutions?

Amy Oldenburg:

I completely understand, and on many levels, I feel this deeply. Much of my career has been spent in emerging markets, where the public’s distrust of the traditional official financial system isn’t some abstract theory from a textbook—it’s a raw, daily reality. This isn’t some vague memory of “Oh, that happened twenty years ago, I kind of remember it.” Look at Russia today, look at Ukraine—friends and colleagues we once worked with on the trading floor had their entire assets in physical banks frozen overnight, completely stripped away. To protect their lifetime of hard-earned savings and safely move their families to another country, they were forced to scramble desperately for any possible way out.

We have watched friends around us lose everything—companies bankrupted, assets reduced to zero—in a sudden, unexpected turn of events. This isn’t something that happened twenty years ago, or during the last Lehman crisis; this is the bloody, undeniable reality unfolding right now (2026).

So, deep down, I live simultaneously in these two entirely opposing worlds. On one hand, I am deeply saddened by the countless bad actors and devastating failures in this industry over the past few years—because these centralized scams have scared away countless individuals seeking financial sovereignty, severely hindering the spread of global consensus. On the other hand, the principles and philosophy of the cypherpunks hold immense value.

We needed tools to continue scaling and enable people to interact with it, but those tools never truly arrived. What did arrive were highly centralized, extremely user-friendly tools that look exactly like all the tools consumers are already accustomed to. I’m not trying to be critical, but the user experience was poor—it has improved somewhat, but it still hasn’t evolved enough.

One thing that opened my eyes was the launch of ETPs and the SEC’s approval in September last year to allow physical spot Bitcoin to be transferred into ETPs. From the perspective of a die-hard Bitcoin believer, taking physical spot Bitcoin and putting it into an ETP run by a traditional financial institution seems heretical to many—but it’s happening on a scale I never anticipated.

Why is this the case? Because people truly need more services. Many have not only built wealth but also continue to believe in this entire philosophy—yet you still need to live your life and manage its various events, whether it’s borrowing, buying property, sending remittances, or ensuring your assets are passed on to the next generation. Some have tried building these services, and some have succeeded—I’m not saying nothing exists out there; some tools have been built very successfully. But sometimes, handing things over to centralized institutions is simply easier—I’m afraid from a security standpoint, and I’m also afraid when it comes to estate planning.

Now, we can offer capital market services around it—for example, if you transfer Bitcoin into a Bitcoin ETP, you can then hold it on our wealth management platform. You are now considered a wealth management client, and depending on the amount transferred, you may be classified as a high-net-worth client. We can provide financing of up to 50% of the ETP’s value, meaning you can borrow up to 50% of the Bitcoin ETP’s value and use that liquidity for other purposes. We’ve already seen clients exploring this model, and we can provide services that support other aspects of their lives. In terms of estate planning, holding assets on our wealth platform is significantly more convenient than self-custody.

But it’s still within an ETP, and some people tell me, “I have Bitcoin exposure, so if something goes wrong, I have Bitcoin.” I say, “No, you don’t have Bitcoin.” You hold shares in a Bitcoin ETP, which gives you exposure to Bitcoin’s price. So I think education is multi-layered: First layer—what is Bitcoin? Second layer—do you understand the difference between holding spot Bitcoin and holding an ETP? Third layer—do you understand the difference between self-custodying Bitcoin and keeping it on a centralized platform? Anyone who had exposure during the FTX era and held assets on centralized exchanges lived through those weeks when we didn’t know which platforms were affected. If your assets aren’t self-custodied, you might quickly move to self-custody just to protect yourself from platforms that are collapsing.

Host Natalie Brunell: What you’re saying is absolutely correct—on one hand, these more traditional financial instruments do unlock liquidity, allowing people to use them for down payments or to borrow against their Bitcoin for major life milestones. But what fascinates me is the optionality: this is the first asset ever that you can self-custody, even memorize in your mind, and in the worst-case scenario, you can flee to another place. U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis made this point in the Senate: it gives you a form of freedom and a human rights tool that nothing else can provide. Yet, if you’re willing to accept counterparty risk, you can also hold it in more traditional ways.

Amy Oldenburg:

This is also my response to the question from the cypherpunk era: those ideas were sound, and they should continue doing what they were doing. I hope those people keep going and that this part of it endures. At this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, I noticed a difference in atmosphere compared to 2021 in Miami’s Wynwood—there was less of the deep exchange around self-sovereignty. Perhaps it’s just the evolution of the conference itself, or the rise of more centralized platforms, or the presence of people like me—from Morgan Stanley—there. But I don’t want to lose that spirit, because it’s a vital part of the ecosystem.

Host Natalie Brunell: I think Bitcoiners would appreciate it when people in suits also stand up for self-custody and sovereignty. So perhaps we can have the best of both worlds. Amy, before we wrap up, is there anything final you’d like to say or anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to add?

Amy Oldenburg:

We are still in the early stages. It’s somewhat regrettable to see debates about quantum computing and Bitcoin—such as whether quantum will end everything—while we’re still arguing over very basic, passive products. But I truly believe this is a long journey, and there’s much more ahead when we talk about Bitcoin credit or other more advanced products. We have new technologies emerging—agentic AI, various evolving agents—perhaps each of us will have our own agent in the future, along with micropayments; all of these will continue shaping what the future landscape looks like. I believe digital assets are a long road ahead, and I’m thrilled to dedicate the next chapter of my career to this space, because I feel we’ll be working in this field for a very long time.