UK institutional investors managing money on behalf of retail clients are preparing to pull the trigger on crypto exchange-traded products, according to asset manager WisdomTree.
Speaking at DigiAssets 2025, Dovile Silenskyte, WisdomTree’s Director of Digital Assets Research, said that she had been in contact with “a large number of institutional investors who are doing a lot of work in getting ready to invest into crypto.”
Silenskyte added that UK firms see the “light at the end of the tunnel” with the country’s regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, reviewing whether retail investors should be able to access crypto ETPs. “If it does allow that, then institutional investors who manage money on behalf of retail will move within a matter of weeks,” she said.
WisdomTree received approval from the FCA to list its Physical Bitcoin and Physical Ethereum ETPs on the London Stock Exchange for professional investors last month. That marked an about-face from the regulator, which had previously banned crypto derivatives products.
The firm’s discussions with institutional investors have focused on Bitcoin’s volatility, Silenskyte said. She noted: “It was the best performing asset for the last eight out of 11 years, and the worst performing asset in the last three out of 11 years, but it’s not correlated to traditional assets.”
With correlations around or below 20%, she added, “once you add such a volatile but uncorrelated asset to a multi-asset portfolio, and if you make sensible allocation and keep on rebalancing, the portfolio improves its risk/return metrics—and large investors are starting to recognize that.”
Altcoin ETFs
Despite WisdomTree having filed for an XRP ETF in the U.S. late last year, Silenskyte predicted that around 80% of investors would focus on Bitcoin products, 10% on Ethereum products with the remaining 10% made up of altcoin products.
“For most investors, Bitcoin is what they will allocate; Bitcoin is what they will have in their multi asset portfolios,” she said.
Those investors without previous Bitcoin exposure or in-depth knowledge of the crypto sector would likely focus on investing in products that combine a basket of digital assets, she added. “Most investors do not have a person like me in their house,” she said.
“They do not have somebody who’s 100% dedicated to looking at individual coins and knowing the value of each one,” she explained. “For most of them, selecting an individual token to put a lot of money in is an impossible task. It would be guessing: is it Solana, is it XRP, is it Dogecoin? So for most of them, going for the crypto basket is what they will do.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
