Wall Street’s crypto push has been years in the making says Morgan Stanley

New York — Morgan Stanley’s head of digital asset strategy Amy Oldenburg pushed back on the idea that Wall Street is only now embracing crypto out of fear of missing out, arguing instead that large banks are acting on years of internal work.

“TradFi is getting FOMO and is now getting involved… it really isn’t accurate,” Oldenburg said during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on Tuesday. “We’ve been on a journey around the entire modernization of financial infrastructure for years.”

Her comments come as major U.S. banks, long seen as cautious or late to crypto, begin to expand beyond limited offerings. For years, firms like Morgan Stanley restricted activity to indirect exposure, such as offering wealthy clients access to bitcoin BTC$69,860.54 funds and, more recently, spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on its E*Trade platform. It even recently filed to launch its own spot bitcoin ETF. Broader participation was slowed by regulatory uncertainty and concerns around custody, compliance and market structure.

That stance has started to shift. Morgan Stanley has recently outlined a more defined digital asset strategy, with efforts spanning trading, asset management and infrastructure.

Oldenburg said the bank is now preparing to support tokenized equities trading on its alternative trading system. “One of the things that we are planning for the second half of 2026 is turning on our trajectory cross… to support tokenized equities later this year,” she said. The platform already handles equities, ETFs and American Depositary Receipts, which she described as a natural base for expansion.

Inside the firm, the transition requires reworking core systems. “We are having to re-teach ourselves what legacy infrastructure, pipes and plumbing look like,” Oldenburg said, pointing to the challenge of upgrading decades-old financial architecture to support faster settlement and continuous trading.

She also highlighted a gap between crypto startups and large institutions. “There’s so many other connectivity points that we need to plug in around it,” she said, noting that founders often underestimate how complex bank systems are.

Even so, areas like stablecoins are gaining traction as a way to move money faster and at lower cost than traditional rails.

Adoption, however, depends on coordination across the financial system. “We can’t just modernize on our own,” Oldenburg said. “This is an incredibly complex, integrated global network.”

Despite weak token prices, she said activity continues to build. “It really is very early innings,” Oldenburg said, signaling that Wall Street’s deeper integration with crypto may be gradual but underway.