Morgan Stanley is unleashing 15,000 wealth advisors to sell Bitcoin ETFs

After months of preparation, one of America’s largest banks is finally allowing wealth advisors to sell Bitcoin ETFs to their clients.

On Wednesday, Morgan Stanley lifted a ban on nearly 15,000 investment advisors from selling Bitcoin ETFs to their clients. With trillions of dollars in portfolio assets now in play among the largest banks, the action on Bitcoin ETFs is sure to be interesting. As CNBC reported last week, Morgan Stanley advisors are now bringing products from BlackRock and Fidelity to their clients.

According to Pantera Capital’s Cosmo Jiang, the startup’s pitching is largely flying under the radar.

“I think this hasn’t been fully realized by the market,” Jiang told Coinage in a new interview. “Bitcoin ETFs have attracted quite a bit of inflows since the beginning of the year, but … if you talk to large issuers, they’ll say they’ve only opened up 10% to 15% of their distribution.”

Now, with Morgan Stanley among the top banks for allowing their asset management teams to incur losses on their clients, that distribution is expected to grow, opening up the potential for Bitcoin to hold trillions of dollars in assets in its portfolio.

“That’s where most of the capital is,” Jiang said of major U.S. telegraph centers. “So I think this unlock will go from 10 to 15 distribution points to eventually 100 distribution points, and all of these telegraph centers [are] “It’s such a big part of it, and for them to open it up… it’s such a big deal.”

At the Bitcoin Conference last month, Bloomberg’s James Seyffart asked BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets Robert Mitchnick when the big banks might open the floodgates. He was looking ahead to the fourth quarter.

“Of course it’s likely to happen this year,” he said.

It’s unclear when other major banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, will change their client acquisition policies. For now, they are following a policy that advisors will only sell Bitcoin ETFs to clients if they ask, according to CNBC.