Wall Street’s new groove: TradFi dives deeper into digital assets

Traditional finance’s push to integrate digital assets has taken another meaningful step forward. Over the past month, several major products and pilot programs slated for 2026 have been announced, signalling that digital asset exposure is rapidly becoming a standard feature of wealth management and capital markets operations.

One notable example is Morgan Stanley’s plan to roll out a proprietary digital wallet in the second half of 2026. The wallet is touted to support both cryptocurrencies and tokenised real‑world assets (RWAs), including private company equity, traditional securities and real estate.

This comes on the heels of the bank’s late 2025 announcement that users of its E*TRADE platform are going to gain access to direct trading of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana in 2026, allowing clients direct ownership of the underlying asset rather than relying exposure through third party investment vehicles.

The bank has also filed S‑1 registration statements with the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) for spot Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ETFs.

Jedd Finn, head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley, said to Barron’s that the wallet reflects a structural shift in financial infrastructure. As tokenisation matures, Morgan Stanley expects to further integrate traditional and decentralized ecosystems.

Morgan Stanley previously described the January 2024’s spot Bitcoin ETF approvals as a “paradigm shift.” Since going live, spot Bitcoin ETFs have already generated over $1.6 trillion in cumulative trading volume. What began as “select high‑net‑worth access” in 2024 has now expanded to crypto exposure across all client accounts, including retirement plans, after a Trump‑era executive order removed earlier restrictions.

Meanwhile, Bank of America is moving in parallel, with 15,000 advisers formally recommending crypto allocations of up to 4% of client portfolios, marking another major U.S. institution entering the mainstream digital‑asset investment landscape.

The strategy mirrors a wider institutional shift in Wall Street, with JPMorgan reportedly exploring both spot and derivatives crypto trading for institutional clients and Bitwise CIO stating that institutions are “charging at crypto full‑speed".

This institutional uptick aligns with recent SEC actions to approve generic listing standards for spot commodity ETFs, eliminating the previously slow, case‑by‑case review process. Under these new standards, exchanges like NYSE, Nasdaq and Cboe can list spot crypto ETFs as long as products meet predefined eligibility criteria.

Beyond investment products, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has announced it is partnering with Digital Asset and the Canton Network to tokenise a subset of U.S. Treasury securities held at DTC. This initiative marks the first phase of DTCC’s broader strategy to migrate DTC‑custodied assets on-chain. The SEC has granted a No‑Action Letter allowing DTCC to operate a tokenisation service for RWAs in a controlled production environment. Under the approval, DTCC is authorised to:

• tokenise real‑world assets held at DTC;

• operate the pilot for three years; and

• guarantee tokenised securities retain the same legal entitlements and investor protections as their traditional equivalents.

  
  

The CEO of DTCC describes the partnership as creating

a roadmap to bring real-world, high-value tokenization use cases to market, starting with U.S. Treasury securities and eventually expanding to a broad spectrum of DTC-eligible assets across network providers.

Taken together, these moves demonstrate TradFi’s accelerating shift into blockchain‑based markets offering direct client acess to these offerings and underscoring that digital assets are increasingly being treated like any other asset class.

Written by Steven Pettigrove, Luke Higgins and Tahlia Kelly