A CoinShares survey has found that half of UK wealth advisers cannot see their clients' cryptocurrency holdings, describing those assets as effectively "invisible" to them. The finding exposes a structural gap between where clients are actually putting their money and what their advisers are able to monitor, discuss, or plan around.
A Visibility Problem, Not Just a Knowledge Gap
The CoinShares data reframes what is often treated as an education problem in wealth management. The issue is not simply that advisers lack familiarity with digital assets — it is that firm-level policies are actively blocking the view. According to the survey, many EU-based wealth management companies have either introduced formal restrictions on digital asset investments or provided no internal guidance on the matter at all. The practical effect is the same: when a client holds crypto, that position sits outside the adviser's line of sight.
That distinction matters. An adviser who cannot see a position cannot factor it into a client's overall risk profile, tax planning, or portfolio construction. The crypto allocation may be large or small, hedged or speculative — the adviser has no way to know.
EU Firms Caught Between Policy and Client Reality
The survey's geographic scope underlines how widespread the policy gap is. Across EU-based wealth management firms, the pattern is consistent: either rules explicitly exclude digital assets, or the silence is so complete that advisers have no framework for handling client questions. Neither outcome serves clients who have already made the decision to hold crypto independently.
CoinShares, which published the findings, is a digital asset investment firm with a direct commercial interest in broader institutional adoption of crypto. Readers should weigh that context. Even so, the core finding — that clients are holding assets their advisers structurally cannot engage with — describes a real operational condition, not a hypothetical one.
The survey does not indicate whether firms plan to revise their policies. What the data does show is that the gap between client behaviour and adviser oversight is already open, and currently has no obvious mechanism for closing itself.