An in-depth look at the “last mile” of institutional adoption of crypto, told through the eyes of practitioners on the frontier of this nascent but increasingly important market.
This report grew out of the Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit, a series of online webinars put on by GenTwo between September 7 and 10, 2026.
The origin of the Summit lay in a proposition advanced in a white paper we published in July: digital assets have attracted institutional interest, but the market has yet to provide the range of structured, bankable investment products that institutional investors take for granted elsewhere.
We used the Summit to test that proposition. Over six sessions, we were joined by practitioners from banking, asset management, tokenization, derivatives trading, and product issuance to examine the market from their own part of the value chain. The result was a set of conversations about a specific question: what would it take for digital assets to acquire the same risk-management machinery that already surrounds equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities?
The answers point to five conclusions.
The report’s central finding is that the supply gap has two parts.
The first is a gap in product supply. Investors can now buy Bitcoin and Ether through spot markets, ETFs, ETPs, and other familiar wrappers. What they cannot yet find in comparable breadth are the non-linear products common in conventional markets: capital-protected notes, reverse convertibles, autocalls, discount certificates, and other instruments that reshape an underlying asset’s return.
This is not because the payoffs are impossible to construct. The financial engineering is well understood. The constraint is industrial: products must be issued, hedged, cleared, custodied, distributed, and supported throughout their lives. Each task requires a willing institution, appropriate balance sheet, reliable infrastructure, and a viable commercial case. Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 examine this product-side shortage.
The second gap is one of transmission. Demand may exist at the client level, but it does not travel directly into a portfolio. It passes through advisors, asset managers, private banks, distributors, and issuers. Where those intermediaries lack familiarity with digital assets, confidence in the available products, or willingness to recommend them, demand can stop before it becomes an allocation. Chapter 3 considers this bottleneck from the perspective of independent asset managers and their clients.
Volatility is usually presented as crypto’s institutional defect. For a structured product, it is raw material.
Options allow an investor to exchange one feature of an investment for another. A capital-protected note can provide a floor at maturity, but the investor gives up some upside participation. A barrier reverse convertible can offer an enhanced coupon, but in return exposes the investor to losses if the underlying falls beyond a defined level. A dual-currency note pays a premium to an investor willing to receive Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies at an agreed price.
None of this makes crypto safe. Nor does it eliminate the need to understand the asset. It changes the shape of the exposure. Rather than accepting the full, linear return of a spot holding, an investor can decide which risks to retain, which to limit, and which to exchange for yield or protection. Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 6 show how that works in practice.
An ETF, ETP, note, AMC, or token can make an asset easier to access. It does not remove the infrastructure required to support it.
A bankable digital-asset product still needs an issuer, a paying agent, an execution venue, a custodian, a calculation agent, recognized security positions, and a route into the investor’s existing custody and settlement arrangements. It must also satisfy two overlapping sets of rules: the securities and distribution rules governing the product itself, and the digital-asset rules governing the infrastructure underneath it. Chapter 2 maps that chain from the investor’s subscription to execution, custody, valuation, and settlement.
Tokenization does not change this basic fact, either. It may simplify issuance, transfer, reconciliation, and settlement. It can make the wrapped assets programmable and potentially more useful as collateral. But it does not change an asset’s underlying economics, generate buyers for an illiquid product, or remove the need for a robust legal and custodial link between a token and the asset or note it represents. Chapter 4 considers both the promise and the limits of tokenization.
The decisive constraint is often not the investor or even the issuer. It is the party willing to take the other side of the embedded derivative risk.
An issuer of a structured product generally does not want to hold that risk outright. It needs an options market and hedging counterparties that can quote, price, and warehouse the exposure. Digital-asset derivatives markets have developed rapidly, and specialist firms can provide liquidity across a wide range of structures. Yet the market remains thinner than the corresponding markets in equities, foreign exchange, or interest rates.
That matters because a mature market is more than a collection of issuers and products. It needs issuers prepared to manufacture products, hedging counterparties with balance sheet and appetite, banks and agents that can make products clearable, custodians and infrastructure providers that can manage the assets and settlement, and distributors and advisors who can place products appropriately. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 examine these links from the perspectives of issuer economics, banking infrastructure, and derivatives market making.
The most credible route into institutional portfolios is likely to use structures investors already know.
The final chapter examines a Bitcoin dual-currency note. It adapts a familiar structured-product format to a new underlying. The investor receives a security rather than a wallet, earns an option-derived coupon, and may take delivery of Bitcoin at a price chosen in advance. The product is issued through a segregated structure, has an ISIN, and clears through conventional securities infrastructure.
That example captures the report’s broader argument. Institutional adoption does not require every investor to adopt crypto-native habits. It requires digital-asset exposure to be brought into existing securities accounts, risk processes, legal structures, and distribution channels. Chapter 6 shows one way this is already happening.
This report does not argue that every investor needs a structured product on Bitcoin, or that tokenization will remove the hard work of building markets. Structured products transform risk. They do not erase it. Tokens can improve market plumbing. They do not create demand. And a product that looks familiar on the surface remains only as sound as the hedging, custody, legal, banking, and operational arrangements beneath it.
The Summit’s conclusion was more practical. The technology, product designs, and early providers are already in place. The next stage is to connect them into a market deep enough to give investors a wider, more disciplined choice of digital-asset exposures.
The chapters that follow trace that work from the basic supply gap to the banking, tokenization, market-making, and product structures required to close it.
Tom Lyons
Head of Communications and Content, GenTwo
A synthesis of the GenTwo Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit, a series of webinars held between September 7 and 10, 2026. Each chapter provides a synthesis of a single webinar.
Read straight through, or jump in by chapter. The persistent left-rail nav follows you between chapters, and the infographic index opens from any page.
This report was created with the help of AI. Specifically, Claude Opus 4.8 was used to draft the chapters based on session transcripts and human input, for additional research, and for fact checking. Perplexity was used for additional fact checking. All of this was done with human supervision. The final draft was edited by a human.
This report is provided for information only. It is not investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or digital asset.
Nothing in this report constitutes an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any financial instrument. Any product referred to is described for illustration. It may not be available in your jurisdiction, it may not be suitable for you, and where it is available it is available to professional investors only.
This material has been prepared with care and we believe it to be accurate as at the date of the session. It is provided without warranty of any kind. Views expressed are those of the individual speakers and not necessarily those of GenTwo or of the organizations they represent.
Digital assets carry a high degree of risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.