WisdomTree received FCA approval to list its Physical Bitcoin and Physical Ethereum ETPs on the London Stock Exchange.

UK institutional investors managing money on behalf of retail clients are preparing to invest in cryptocurrency products traded on exchanges, according to asset manager WisdomTree.

Speaking at DigiAssets 2025, Dovile Silenskyte, Director of Digital Asset Research at WisdomTree, said she had been in contact with “a large number of institutional investors who are working hard to prepare to invest in crypto.”

Silenskyte added that UK companies see “light at the end of the tunnel” with the country’s regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), reviewing whether retail investors should have access to cryptocurrency ETPs. “If they allow this, then institutional investors managing money on behalf of retail will move within weeks,” she said.

WisdomTree received FCA approval to list its Physical Bitcoin and Physical Ethereum ETPs on the London Stock Exchange for professional investors last month. This marked a 180-degree shift from the regulator, which had previously banned crypto derivative products.

The company's discussions with institutional investors focused on Bitcoin's volatility, Silenskyte said. She noted: “It has been the best-performing asset in eight of the last 11 years, and the worst-performing in three of the last 11 years, but it is uncorrelated with traditional assets.”

With correlations around 20% or below, she added: “Once you add such a volatile but uncorrelated asset to a multi-asset portfolio, and if you make sensible allocations and keep rebalancing, the portfolio improves its risk/return metrics — and large investors are starting to recognize this.”

Altcoin ETFs

Although WisdomTree filed for an XRP ETF in the U.S. at the end of last year, Silenskyte predicted that about 80% of investors would focus on Bitcoin products, 10% on Ethereum products, and the remaining 10% on altcoin products.

“For most investors, Bitcoin is what they will allocate; Bitcoin is what they will have in their multi-asset portfolios,” she said.

These investors with no previous exposure to Bitcoin or deep knowledge of the crypto sector would likely focus on investing in products that combine a basket of digital assets, she added. “Most investors don’t have a person like me at home,” she stated.

“They don't have someone 100% dedicated to looking at individual coins and knowing the value of each,” she explained. “For most of them, selecting an individual token to invest a lot of money is an impossible task. It would be a guess: would it be Solana, XRP, or Dogecoin? Therefore, for most of them, opting for the crypto basket is what they will do.”