Almost a year and a half after Bitcoin
The funds quoted in the Spot Stock Exchange broke out in the financial system of the United States, financial advisors are still trying to wrap their heads around cryptography.
That is according to Gerry O’Shea, Chief of Insights Global Market at Crypto Asset Manager Hashdex.
“The overwhelming majority of financial advisors in particular do not recommend an assignment to Bitcoin or cryptography to their clients at this time,” O’Shea told Coindesk in an interview.
“Of course, there are some who have been thinking very proactively in this space and that their clients’ exposure to it, but that is really a small subset of the general market,” he added. “Most of what we have been doing in recent years is based on education.”
The advisors are receptive to all this, said O’Shea: it is simply that due diligence takes time and that moves relatively slowly. In other words, these are still very early in terms of advisors who recommend cryptographic exposure to their clients.
Their questions have passed beyond trying to understand what Bitcoin or Blockchain is, and now they focus more on the role that digital assets can play in someone’s portfolio, according to O’Shea. Should it be seen as a capital allocation? Should I replace gold? General skepticism towards the class of assets as a whole tends to limit itself to major generations of financial advisors.
Volatility is upper in the upper part of the concerns. The advisors can be aware that Bitcoin is an active in development with a 16 -year history, but at the end of the day, they can still have difficulty supporting regular decreases of 20% or more of the currency.
The anxieties about Bitcoin’s energy consumption, which were large enough in 2021 so that Tesla stops receiving Bitcoin payments, have backed away in second place, said O’Shea. In fact, the narration around the work test seems to have changed significantly in recent months, he said, with people increasingly appreciating that Bitcoin Mining can help develop renewable energy projects.
Third is crime. Bitcoin is still often seen, even by members of Congress, as a payment system that facilitates drug traffickers and sanctions evaders. Financial advisors still mention this as a point of concern, said O’Shea.
For him, there are two main themes in 2025 when it comes to digital assets: Bitcoin and Stablecoins. And although it is not so simple to obtain exposure to the Stablecoin market growth, he declared that intelligent contract platforms such as Ethereum and Solana, which provide the infrastructure for the stables to work, should be interesting for investors.
“There is certainly a real utility for these platforms. Many people refer to stable currencies such as the first murderous application, right? Because it is something that people can understand,” said O’Shea.
In any case, the doubt around Bitcoin will not last forever, he predicted. “These people are underestimating how developed this ecosystem and how beneficial it can be an allocation to this kind of long -term assets,” he said. “Even by the end of the year, there will be much more than will appreciate that fact.”
