Amy Oldenburg

I'm Felix Stratmann, Global Digital Asset Strategist with Morgan Stanley Research.

And I'm Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Asset Strategy.

Today, we're looking beyond crypto prices to explore how digital assets could transform the way financial markets operate.

It's Thursday, October 29th at 2 p.m. in London.

It's like so crazy.

Uh, well, but my Tracy Katona, my old Pilates instructor from Oregon, but then my friend, Anna Paffle, who would talk about mental health, my friend, my friend, Dr. Amy Oldenburg, who would talk about injury prevention and nutrition and stuff.

And so, um, It was so great, but it was so much work.

And so Mary kind of started pitching this a couple of years ago.

Well, and if Bitcoin is becoming a more mature asset that could have important implications for how investors think about their retirement savings.

We spoke with Amy Oldenburg of Morgan Stanley about this topic last week.

What does it take to bring more Bitcoin exposure into retirement accounts? Let's take a listen.

Now, when it comes to explaining the role of Bitcoin in portfolios for your clients, can you walk us through how you help them think about position sizing and specifically for your investors who are closer to retirement age, how should they be thinking about Bitcoin?

To see this movement with some of the risk assets, that we need this to really play the role in portfolios that I think that the rationale that we've really talked about a fair bit on this digital gold position, especially when you see the gold price actually going up and you see that Bitcoin price retreating over the last day or so.

So that's something we just need to be a little bit conscious of here because we do think that digital gold rationale is a pretty strong rationale for Bitcoin within that asset allocation.

So given what we just heard from Amy Oldenburg, this could be a pretty significant development for Bitcoin's long-term investor base.

Because if retirement accounts start allocating to Bitcoin on a regular basis, I mean, what does that mean for the traditional four-year cycle?

The the the gentleman from the roll up, Robbie, I believe his name was, is calling it the financial singularity.

And, you know, I also spoke with Amy Oldenburg of the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley and crypto and like TradFi fintech is it actually is converging into a single thing.

Yeah.

And I asked the question because I've been skeptical, like why we've in for crypto natives and within our industry, the question, the statement has been crypto.

We'll get to, uh, that as well.

But here's who's joining us on today's episode: Amy Oldenburg, head of digital asset strategy at Morgan Stanley, Michael Warren, mathematics associate professor at the University of Oregon, Obianwu Osu, CEO of Fedi, Lark Davis, host of The Lark Davis Show, and Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat Global Advisors.

But let's begin with our headlines.

BlackRock's digital asset products brought in $7.9 billion in net inflows during Q3, reversing outflows from the first half of the year.

At the end of the day, it's not just Warsh, it's a board of governors, uh, and they'll have to make a decision together.

A lot of moving pieces, but let's get back to Bitcoin and welcome in our first guest of the day.

A 25-year veteran of Morgan Stanley, Amy Oldenburg now runs Digital Asset Strategy and just built the bank's first spot Bitcoin ETF.

Good morning, Amy.

Let's break down what this means for institutional investors and wealth managers.

Morgan Stanley's delay is primarily due to the absence of specific tokenized equity products and a lack of client demand, as explained by Amy Oldenburg, the head of the bank's digital asset strategy.

The postponement affects only the tokenized equity support on their ATS, leaving the bank's broader digital asset business unchanged.

It's important to note that an ATS is an institutional order matching venue, which means this move doesn't open tokenized equity trading to retail customers.

So Morgan Stanley now expects to start supporting tokenized equities on its alternative trading system in Q1 of 2027, later than its previously announced timeline of H2 2026.

Here's a quote, "Q1 is probably more realistic because it'll be aligned with other activities that are happening in the broader ecosystem, but the team is definitely actively building it," Morgan Stanley's Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Amy Oldenburg, told The Block in an interview.

So, folks, as we've been talking about, TradFi is in a race to tokenize assets, launch crypto investment products, and more.

And Morgan Stanley, many of you may recall, they were a bit late to the game, right? Uh, they were last to essentially launch a Bitcoin ETF out of the major firms like BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, and others.

Game theory's playing out.

No one wants to get left behind.

Some more details from the interview with Amy Oldenburg.

She said the tokenized RWA market will be within the $3 trillion to $10 trillion range by 2030 without question.

I mean, we're already seeing tokenized stock trading hitting a hundred million dollars daily on base, according to Jesse Pollak.

Yeah, and Amy Oldenburg, Morgan Stanley's digital asset chief, she's projecting the tokenized real world asset market to reach between three and ten trillion dollars by 2030.

Ten trillion dollars migrating to blockchain infrastructure in the next few years.

That is a total rewrite of global financial plumbing.