The survey covers five markets – France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the UK – and reaches a single, structural conclusion: clients are already invested in digital assets, and for a large share of advisors, the majority of that exposure sits entirely outside their view.

The survey calls this the management gap: the share of a client's digital asset exposure that sits outside the advisor's oversight, unmonitored and invisible to the advisory relationship. One in four European advisors report a management gap above 50 per cent: meaning that the larger part of what their clients hold in digital assets is invisible to the person paid to manage it. In the UK, that figure reaches 52 per cent.

This is not a forecast about future demand. It describes what already sits inside client portfolios today, the firm said in a statement.

The pattern holds without exception across all five advisor postures and all five markets: the less an advisor engages, the larger the gap. Among advisors who actively recommend digital assets, almost one in 10 report a management gap above 50 per cent, i.e. more than half of what the client holds in crypto is invisible to the advisor. Among advisors who feel insufficiently informed to advise, it is two in five: more than four times higher, the survey shows. Where the conversation happens, exposure converts into managed allocation. Where it cannot, clients act alone, on exchanges and self-custody platforms which their advisor has never seen.

Eight per cent of all advisors surveyed describe the problem in its most acute form: they report rising client interest and unmanaged exposure above 50 per cent at the same time. These clients are already invested, outside the advisor's sight, and their positions are growing, the firm said.

One possible conclusion from such findings is that wealth advisors need clearer information from clients about such crypto assets if they're going to be able to give comprehensive guidance on topics such as suitable asset allocation.

Firm policy is the cause
The survey's central finding is that the management gap has one primary driver: firm policy. Sixty-one per cent of advisors work in firms that either explicitly restrict digital assets or provide no clear internal guidance, what the report calls "blocked firms." This single variable shapes everything that follows.

Across the four policy levels measured, active recommendation falls from 48 per cent in firms with clear support to 1 per cent in firms that explicitly restrict. The management gap moves in the opposite direction over the same range: from 4 per cent to 34 per cent. Advisors in firms that support digital asset engagement are 4.5 times more likely to recommend than those in blocked firms, and the gap is 8.5 times larger in restricted firms than in supported ones. Engagement intent and client demand are consistent across every policy environment. What differs is whether the advisor is permitted to act.

The knowledge gap follows the institutional one rather than causing it: more than three quarters of advisors who feel insufficiently informed work in blocked firms: advisors who were never trained because their firm never positioned itself to train them.

"The data is uncomfortable, so let us state it plainly. Across Europe, one in four wealth managers cannot see the majority of their clients' digital assets. In the UK, it is more than one in two. The capital has already been allocated,” Jean-Marie Mognetti, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of CoinShares, said. “The people entrusted with managing it simply cannot see it, and in most cases not because clients are unwilling to engage, but because firm policy prevents them from doing so. This is not a knowledge problem. It is not a demand problem. It is a firm-policy problem becoming a wrong-way risk."