A CoinShares survey has found that half of UK wealth advisers lack visibility into the cryptocurrency holdings their clients carry outside of managed accounts — a structural blind spot that leaves a growing asset class effectively untracked in advisory relationships. The same research found that many EU-based wealth management firms either restrict investments in digital assets outright or have no policy guidance on them at all.
The Visibility Gap
The central finding is stark: half of UK advisers surveyed by CoinShares describe their clients' crypto as invisible to them. That framing — the advisers' own word, not the researcher's — matters. It suggests not merely a data gap but an acknowledged failure of oversight, one that leaves advisers unable to account for how digital assets interact with the rest of a client's portfolio. Risk cannot be managed across positions that the adviser does not know exist.
The survey does not specify what proportion of client wealth sits in those untracked holdings, but the structural problem is clear regardless of size: crypto held on personal wallets or exchanges falls entirely outside the reporting and disclosure frameworks that govern managed money.
A Policy Vacuum in Europe
Among EU-based wealth management firms, CoinShares found a different but related problem. Many have policies that actively restrict investments in digital assets, while others have no guidance on the subject at all. Restriction and silence produce the same practical outcome: advisers operating without a framework for discussing or accommodating crypto with clients who already hold it.
That policy gap is notable given that regulators across the UK and the European Union have been moving toward more structured oversight of digital assets. The absence of internal firm guidance suggests that regulatory intent and institutional readiness are not moving in step.
What the Survey Signals
Taken together, the CoinShares data describes a profession that is trailing its clients. Wealth advisers are being asked to manage holistic financial pictures while a portion of those pictures remains deliberately or incidentally out of view. Until firms build the infrastructure — and the policies — to bring digital assets into the advisory relationship, the gap between what clients hold and what advisers can see is likely to persist.