Big investment firms, including Abrdn, BlackRock, and Charles Schwab, are embracing digital assets despite the crypto crash, as consumer groups raise concerns
Context & Ripple Effects
This August 2022 report captures the moment traditional asset managers decided the crypto crash was a buying opportunity rather than a warning: Abrdn, BlackRock, and Charles Schwab moved into digital assets even as consumer groups warned that regulated brands were lending legitimacy to a market still reeling. The move sat awkwardly beside the banking side of the street — months later, US banks were retreating from crypto clients under a growing regulatory crackdown, leaving asset managers as the visible institutional face of the asset class.
The subsequent arc validates both camps at once. Rivals such as State Street, Pimco, and Amundi raced to build their own platforms on the Aladdin model, while Standard Chartered ring-fenced crypto into separate companies betting fund managers prefer trusted names to opaque native firms. By 2025, Wall Street's embrace had widened into a politically opportunistic rush that some executives themselves feared was outrunning prudence.
First-order effects
- Abrdn, BlackRock, and Charles Schwab commit product and distribution resources to digital assets during a drawdown, directly contradicting the risk posture their consumer-group critics say they should hold.
- Consumer groups gain a concrete target for regulatory pressure: household-name managers whose reputations now backstop crypto products sold to ordinary investors.
Second-order effects
- Competing managers respond by building proprietary digital investment platforms rather than outsourcing to crypto-native firms, turning portfolio infrastructure into the competitive moat.
- Banks' parallel retreat from crypto clients shifts the institutional channel toward asset managers and ring-fenced vehicles like Standard Chartered's separately branded crypto companies, concentrating distribution with trusted brands.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, digital assets get absorbed into mainstream finance through regulated, brand-backed wrappers — but the cycle cuts both ways, as shown by digital-asset treasury firms later pivoting to AI when prices slumped and their stocks punished the strategy.
- The recurring tension between institutional adoption and consumer-group alarm points toward regulation becoming the swing variable that determines whether each wave of Wall Street entry sticks or reverses.
The trend: Traditional finance is institutionalizing crypto through trusted brands and platform infrastructure, with each adoption wave rising and falling on the regulatory cycle rather than on crypto prices alone.