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Morgan Stanley’s Amy Oldenburg said a future move by major banks to put Bitcoin on their balance sheets is not totally out of the question, citing regulatory progress while emphasizing that capital rules and global supervisory alignment still matter.
Speaking during a Bitcoin 2026 conference panel, Oldenburg was asked what it would take for a regulated institution such as Morgan Stanley to move from offering Bitcoin exposure to actually holding Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
Oldenburg said that if regulatory progress continues, banks could see a path forward. She framed the idea as procedurally possible rather than imminent, noting that the shift from providing exposure to holding Bitcoin directly would require changes across prudential capital, examiner expectations, accounting, liquidity planning and board-level risk appetite.
She cautioned that the constraint is not a single rule. She pointed first to SAB 121, SEC accounting guidance that had made it more difficult for banks to custody crypto assets at scale before its rollback changed part of the equation. She then broadened the focus to international prudential standards.
Oldenburg highlighted the Basel Committee’s cryptoasset standard, which assigns the most conservative treatment to unbacked crypto assets such as Bitcoin. Industry advocates have argued that the 1,250% risk-weight treatment makes direct balance-sheet exposure uneconomic.
In February 2026, the Basel Committee said it had expedited a targeted review of its prudential standard for banks’ cryptoasset exposures, with an update expected later in the year.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute has been pushing the discussion into the US rulemaking process. In March, it said it planned to review and comment on the Federal Reserve’s coming Basel proposal, arguing that the current treatment discourages banks from holding or servicing Bitcoin due to the punitive risk weight.
Oldenburg also pointed to US regulatory moves that have not been a straight line toward banks holding Bitcoin. In April 2025, the Federal Reserve withdrew earlier guidance tied to banks’ crypto-asset and dollar-token activities, saying the change would keep expectations aligned with evolving risks and support innovation in the banking system. The FDIC and OCC also moved away from prior-approval style frameworks for permissible crypto activity, while maintaining that banks still need sound risk management.
More recently, US banking agencies clarified that eligible tokenized securities should generally receive the same capital treatment as their non-tokenized equivalents, describing the capital rule as technology neutral. Oldenburg noted that this does not directly resolve Bitcoin’s balance-sheet treatment because Bitcoin is not a tokenized version of a traditional security. Still, she said the clarification reflects regulators separating blockchain rails from asset risk rather than treating all digital-asset exposures as the same category.
Oldenburg’s overall point was that the path for a bank to hold Bitcoin is not simply “regulators become more pro-crypto.” She identified two main requirements.
At press time, BTC traded at $1.3716.
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