Financial advisors are split on crypto in retirement accounts because the data genuinely supports both sides at once — adoption is growing faster than ever, and the majority still won’t recommend it. Both of those facts are true in the same survey, in the same year.
Here’s the actual numbers behind each side, plus a real 10-year comparison worth knowing before deciding where you stand.
The Case for: Adoption Is Genuinely Accelerating
The Bitwise/VettaFi 2026 Benchmark Survey, now in its eighth year and covering 299 financial advisors, shows the fastest growth this category has ever recorded — a big part of why financial advisors are split on crypto rather than settled in one direction. Advisors who allocated to crypto in client accounts went from 11% in 2023, to 22% in 2024, to 32% in 2025 — tripling in two years.
It’s not just professional exposure, either. 56% of advisors now personally own crypto, up from 49% the year before. Among advisors who already have a crypto allocation, 99% said they plan to maintain or increase it in 2026. On price specifically, 65% believe Bitcoin will be higher a year from now, with similar confidence in Ethereum (62%) and Solana (57%).
The preferred method also says something about how mainstream this has become: advisors most often choose crypto equity ETFs — a regulated, familiar structure — funding those positions primarily by reallocating from equities (43%) or cash (35%), rather than treating it as new, separate speculative money.
The Case Against: Most Advisors Still Won’t Recommend It
At the very same time, a majority of advisors remain unable or unwilling to act on any of that enthusiasm.
58% of surveyed advisors said they either cannot buy crypto assets in client accounts at all, or aren’t sure whether they can — a compliance and firm-policy barrier, not a market opinion, according to PLANADVISER’s coverage of the same survey.
In a separate Capitalize survey of over 200 advisors, almost two-thirds said they wouldn’t recommend retirement investors allocate any funds to digital assets. Asked specifically about Bitcoin IRAs, only 25% called them a wise investment, while 46% said no outright.
This isn’t a case of a small, vocal minority holding out against an otherwise unified profession. Nearly two out of every three advisors surveyed land on the “don’t recommend it” side of this question, even as the smaller group that does allocate grows more confident every year. Both groups are large enough, and both trends are moving fast enough, that neither side looks like it’s about to fold into the other anytime soon.
The Part Almost Nobody Expects: The Public Is More Bullish Than the Experts
Here’s the detail that reverses the usual assumption about who’s more cautious.
In that same Capitalize survey, 61% of employees said they view digital assets as a strong retirement investment option — compared to just 46.5% of the financial advisors surveyed alongside them. The people managing other people’s retirement money professionally are, on average, more skeptical than the people actually saving for their own retirement.
A separate, larger survey from the National Institute on Retirement Security (1,203 Americans, late 2025) found the opposite framing too: 77% of the general public described crypto in retirement plans as risky, and 53% opposed even letting employers offer it as an option at all. Both surveys are measuring real sentiment — they’re just capturing different slices of a genuinely divided public.
Why the Split Exists: The Regulatory Ground Is Still Moving
Part of why financial advisors are split on crypto is that the rules they’re operating under have been shifting in real time, not just professional disagreement about the asset itself.
In March 2026, the Department of Labor proposed new rules spelling out how 401(k) fiduciaries could include alternative assets like crypto, complete with safe harbors meant to reduce litigation risk.
Three months later, in June 2026, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, along with Representative Bobby Scott, publicly urged the Department to withdraw the proposal entirely, citing crypto’s volatility and what they described as insufficient investor safeguards.
An advisor trying to build a consistent professional position in the middle of that back-and-forth is, in a real sense, aiming at a moving target. Some of the “split” isn’t disagreement about crypto itself — it’s disagreement about how much legal and fiduciary risk a firm is willing to carry while the actual rules are still being contested at the federal level.
A Real 10-Year Comparison, If You’re Deciding Where to Land
Since part of this decision comes down to time horizon, it’s worth looking at what actually happened over the most recent full decade for anyone who locked money away and didn’t touch it.
Measured from roughly 2016 to 2026, Bitcoin’s return has landed somewhere between 9,300% and 13,500%, depending on exact dates. The S&P 500 — the kind of index exposure sitting inside a traditional IRA — returned somewhere around 245–254% over the same stretch. Annualized, that’s roughly 70% a year for Bitcoin against roughly 13% a year for the S&P 500.
That comparison isn’t uniform across every window, though. Zoom into just the most recent three years, and the index fund actually came out ahead — the S&P 500 returned about 33% from 2023–2026, versus roughly 21% for Bitcoin, and 2025 alone saw the S&P 500 gain 17.9% while Bitcoin lost 6.3%.
Both the extraordinary full-decade number and the more ordinary recent numbers are equally real; they’re just describing different stretches of the same asset’s history.
This is worth connecting directly back to the advisor split covered above. Advisors funding crypto positions by reallocating from equities and cash, per the Bitwise survey, are implicitly making a bet on the first number continuing to hold going forward.
Advisors declining to recommend any allocation are implicitly weighting the second, more recent pattern more heavily, along with the volatility that produced both outcomes in the same asset within a few years of each other.
A Practical Way to Use This Split
- Don’t treat “advisors are split” as a reason to avoid deciding. It’s a reason to make your own decision deliberately, since even the professionals aren’t offering a single unified answer to lean on.
- Separate the compliance barrier from the investment opinion. A large share of the 58% who “can’t or aren’t sure” they can offer crypto are constrained by firm policy, not necessarily their own view of the asset — worth asking directly if you’re working with an advisor.
- Weigh which survey result matches your own time horizon. The full-decade number and the recent 3-year number both come from the same asset; the one more relevant to you depends on how long you’re actually planning to hold.
- Watch the regulatory situation rather than assuming it’s settled. The gap between the DOL’s March 2026 proposal and the pushback that followed in June suggests the rules here are still genuinely in motion.
- If you’re working with an advisor who won’t discuss crypto at all, ask why specifically. “My firm doesn’t allow it” and “I’ve reviewed the data and don’t recommend it” are different answers that call for different responses from you.
Questions Worth Answering
If most advisors won’t recommend crypto, does that mean it’s a bad idea? Not necessarily — a large share of that hesitation traces to compliance and liability concerns rather than a definitive read on the asset’s future performance, which is a different kind of “no” than a purely investment-based one.
Why are employees more optimistic about crypto than the advisors managing their money? One plausible explanation from the data: advisors bear direct professional and fiduciary liability for a recommendation gone wrong in a way an individual investor making their own choice does not, which naturally makes the advisor’s bar for recommending something higher.
Is the regulatory uncertainty likely to resolve soon? There’s no clear timeline — the back-and-forth between the March 2026 DOL proposal and the June 2026 congressional pushback suggests this could remain unsettled for a while yet, rather than resolving cleanly in either direction.
Should I wait for advisors to reach consensus before making a decision? Given how fast the underlying data is moving in both directions at once, waiting for full agreement among professionals isn’t guaranteed to happen on any predictable timeline — it’s reasonable to make an informed decision now rather than wait indefinitely for total consensus.
Where I’ll Add My Own View
Everything above is survey data and market history. This closing part is mine alone.
Given how split even the professionals are — and financial advisors are split on crypto in a way that’s unlikely to resolve cleanly anytime soon — my own take is that the safest approach for most people is a straightforward 50/50 split between traditional retirement investments and crypto exposure. Not because the math demands exactly that ratio, but because it keeps either side from being able to wreck the whole plan on its own.
I don’t think most people should go much heavier than that into crypto unless they’ve genuinely put in the work — and by that I mean something closer to a decade of real study, not a few weekends of reading.
Without that foundation, a large allocation tends to run into a much more basic problem than market risk: the mental steadiness needed to hold through a 60–80% drawdown without panic-selling simply isn’t there yet for most people, and that’s usually what actually turns a paper loss into a real one.
On the 10-year comparison specifically, my honest view is this: if you’re genuinely locking money away for a full decade and won’t touch it regardless of what happens in between, the historical numbers say you bet on whichever side has shown the higher probability of paying off over that kind of stretch — and on the full-decade data, that’s been crypto, by a wide margin.
That’s a statement about long, undisturbed time horizons specifically, not a suggestion for money you might need to touch sooner. A 50/50 split is how I’d personally balance that long-run probability against the very real chance of not having the stomach to sit through the years in between.