Morgan Stanley’s Amy Oldenburg mentioned a future transfer by main banks to place Bitcoin on their steadiness sheets is “not completely out of the query,” pointing to regulatory progress whereas warning that capital guidelines and world supervisory alignment nonetheless matter.
Talking throughout a Bitcoin 2026 convention panel, Oldenburg was requested what it will take for a financial institution like Morgan Stanley, or one other regulated monetary establishment, to make the leap from providing Bitcoin publicity to really holding Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
“Bitcoin on the steadiness sheet,” she mentioned, pausing on the premise. “, I feel if we proceed to see the progress that we’ve made over the past 16 months or so in regulatory, that that’s one thing that you could be see going ahead. It’s not completely out of the query.”
Morgan Stanley And Bitcoin?
That reply is notable much less as a result of it indicators an imminent transfer and extra as a result of it frames the thought as procedurally attainable. For years, the financial institution steadiness sheet query has sat on the far finish of institutional Bitcoin adoption: past ETFs, past custody, past shopper entry, and into the realm of prudential capital, examiner expectations, accounting, liquidity planning and board-level threat urge for food.
Oldenburg’s caveat was that the constraint just isn’t a single rule. She pointed first to SAB 121, the SEC accounting steering that had made it harder for banks to custody crypto belongings at scale earlier than its rollback modified a part of the equation. However she instantly widened the lens.
Associated Studying
“I feel the opposite factor too is we had been speaking about SAB 121 rolling again on the capital remedy, nevertheless it’s not simply that that holds us again,” she mentioned. “It’s Fed steering, it’s Basel steering. If you’re a big G-sub financial institution, it’s not only one company that you just report back to.”
That’s the core of the difficulty for a agency like Morgan Stanley. A world systemically essential financial institution doesn’t consider Bitcoin solely via a market-risk lens. It has to fulfill a number of regulators, capital frameworks and jurisdictional expectations directly. Oldenburg mentioned massive banks have “many oversight teams” to take care of and wish “slightly bit extra alignment throughout the board with a few of these businesses.”
The Backdrop
The Basel level is particularly essential. The Basel Committee’s cryptoasset commonplace locations essentially the most conservative remedy on unbacked crypto belongings resembling Bitcoin, and business advocates have argued that the 1,250% risk-weight remedy successfully makes direct financial institution balance-sheet publicity uneconomic. The Basel Committee mentioned in February 2026 that it had expedited a focused assessment of its prudential commonplace for banks’ cryptoasset exposures, with an replace anticipated later within the 12 months.
The Bitcoin Coverage Institute has been making an attempt to push that debate into the US implementation course of. In March, the group mentioned it deliberate to assessment and touch upon the Federal Reserve’s coming Basel proposal, arguing that the present remedy discourages banks from holding or servicing Bitcoin due to the punitive threat weight.
Associated Studying
The US facet has additionally been transferring, although not in a straight line towards bank-owned Bitcoin. In April 2025, the Federal Reserve withdrew earlier steering tied to banks’ crypto-asset and dollar-token actions, saying the transfer would preserve expectations aligned with evolving dangers and help innovation within the banking system. The FDIC and OCC additionally moved away from prior-approval type frameworks for permissible crypto exercise, whereas sustaining that banks nonetheless want sound threat administration.
Extra lately, US banking businesses clarified that eligible tokenized securities ought to usually obtain the identical capital remedy as their non-tokenized equivalents, describing the capital rule as know-how impartial. That clarification doesn’t clear up Bitcoin’s balance-sheet remedy, as a result of Bitcoin just isn’t a tokenized model of a standard safety. But it surely does present regulators separating blockchain rails from asset threat, reasonably than treating each digital-asset publicity as the identical class.
That distinction helps clarify Oldenburg’s reply. The trail for a financial institution to carry Bitcoin just isn’t merely “regulators change into extra pro-crypto.” The primary level is Basel: if Bitcoin stays topic to essentially the most punitive capital remedy, a G-SIB has little financial incentive to warehouse it as a treasury asset, even when shopper demand is evident.
The second level is Federal Reserve supervision: even after current rollbacks, massive banks nonetheless want a coherent examiner framework that tells them how Bitcoin publicity can be judged throughout security and soundness, liquidity, operational threat and capital planning.
At press time, BTC traded at $1.3716.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com