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CoinShares, a Jersey-headquartered global asset manager specialising in digital assets, has published the findings of a 2026 survey of 261 European wealth management professionals. The findings raise the question of whether suitable asset allocation can take place if advisors don’t see a client’s full portfolio.
A new CoinShares
survey of 261 advisors across five markets finds that firm
policy, not knowledge or client demand, determines whether crypto
exposure is managed, or invisible.
The survey covers five markets – France, Germany, Italy,
Switzerland and the UK – and reaches a single,
structural conclusion: clients are already invested in digital
assets, and for a large share of advisors, the majority of that
exposure sits entirely outside their view.
The survey calls this the management gap: the share of a client’s
digital asset exposure that sits outside the advisor’s oversight,
unmonitored and invisible to the advisory relationship. One in
four European advisors report a management gap above 50 per cent:
meaning that the larger part of what their clients hold in
digital assets is invisible to the person paid to manage it. In
the UK, that figure reaches 52 per cent.
This is not a forecast about future demand. It describes what
already sits inside client portfolios today, the firm said in a
statement.
The pattern holds without exception across all five advisor
postures and all five markets: the less an advisor engages, the
larger the gap. Among advisors who actively recommend digital
assets, almost one in 10 report a management gap above 50 per
cent, i.e. more than half of what the client holds in crypto is
invisible to the advisor. Among advisors who feel insufficiently
informed to advise, it is two in five: more than four times
higher, the survey shows. Where the conversation happens,
exposure converts into managed allocation. Where it cannot,
clients act alone, on exchanges and self-custody platforms which
their advisor has never seen.
Eight per cent of all advisors surveyed describe the problem in
its most acute form: they report rising client interest and
unmanaged exposure above 50 per cent at the same time. These
clients are already invested, outside the advisor’s sight, and
their positions are growing, the firm said.
One possible conclusion from such findings is that wealth
advisors need clearer information from clients about such crypto
assets if they’re going to be able to give comprehensive guidance
on topics such as suitable asset allocation.
Firm policy is the cause
The survey’s central finding is that the management gap has one
primary driver: firm policy. Sixty-one per cent of advisors work
in firms that either explicitly restrict digital assets or
provide no clear internal guidance, what the report calls
“blocked firms.” This single variable shapes everything that
follows.
Across the four policy levels measured, active recommendation
falls from 48 per cent in firms with clear support to 1 per cent
in firms that explicitly restrict. The management gap moves in
the opposite direction over the same range: from 4 per cent to 34
per cent. Advisors in firms that support digital asset engagement
are 4.5 times more likely to recommend than those in blocked
firms, and the gap is 8.5 times larger in restricted firms than
in supported ones. Engagement intent and client demand are
consistent across every policy environment. What differs is
whether the advisor is permitted to act.
The knowledge gap follows the institutional one rather than
causing it: more than three quarters of advisors who feel
insufficiently informed work in blocked firms: advisors who were
never trained because their firm never positioned itself to train
them.
“The data is uncomfortable, so let us state it plainly. Across
Europe, one in four wealth managers cannot see the majority of
their clients’ digital assets. In the UK, it is more than one in
two. The capital has already been allocated,” Jean-Marie
Mognetti, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of
CoinShares, said. “The people entrusted with managing it simply
cannot see it, and in most cases not because clients are
unwilling to engage, but because firm policy prevents them from
doing so. This is not a knowledge problem. It is not a demand
problem. It is a firm-policy problem becoming a wrong-way risk.”