The premise of our Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit is that a gap has opened between the demand for structured products on digital assets and the available supply, and that closing this gap represents in our opinion the “last mile” in full institutional adoption. This thesis had initially been developed in our white paper published in July 2026 (and that had served as the basis for our Summit program). Our first session set the scene by picking up where our white paper had left off. We looked at both the structured products and digital assets market, analyzed the gap between them, and looked at what might be done to close it.
We opened with a short update of the market data from our white paper. We were then joined by two senior experts from GenTwo. Patrick Loepfe set out what a structured product is and why a volatile asset makes good raw material for one. Florian Marty then discussed why the supply is not there, before describing the off-balance-sheet route around it. We closed on what has to happen for a vibrant structured products market to form in the digital assets space.
Patrick Loepfe is Co-Founder and Chairman of GenTwo. Florian Marty is Managing Director of GenTwo Digital.
Market Size and Demand
We began with a look at the digital assets market from the point of view of non-crypto-native investors as our white paper of July 2026 had described it. Across 2025 there was strong interest in digital assets and above all in Bitcoin, with for example Bitcoin exchange-traded products peaking near USD 170 billion in assets. This was followed by a major market correction. Over the first half of 2026 Bitcoin fell nearly 30%, and spot Bitcoin ETF assets dropped to around USD 78 billion at the trough in June. What held through this correction, however, were the structural signals. Cumulative net inflows since the ETFs launched in January 2024 stayed positive, coin holdings held near their peak, and corporate treasuries kept buying through the dip.
We read this as a sorting. Tactical money had left and long-term allocators had stayed. By the time of the Summit Bitcoin had recovered toward USD 80,000 and ETF assets had climbed back toward USD 100 billion, with some of the money that had left now returning. Our reading was that institutional demand for digital assets is here and likely to stay. The surveys pointed the same way, with roughly 73% of institutions saying they planned to increase their allocations in 2026.
Next we looked at the structured products market as a whole. This is a well-established market, and has been for a long time. Global sales reached USD 1.85 trillion in 2025 by the latest figures, up about a third on 2024, with roughly USD 2.5 trillion in outstanding notional worldwide. Switzerland is by far the largest market, with about CHF 309 billion outstanding, and EMEA is the fastest-growing hub, though the growth is a global phenomenon.
What Is a Structured Product, and Why Does It Matter?
Next we took a look at what structured products actually are. For this we turned to Patrick Loepfe, GenTwo’s Chairman. Loepfe has had a long and distinguished career in the space, having among other things built the deritrade structured products platform at Vontobel. He later founded GenTwo, whose mission it is to reduce friction and cost in how structured products are made.
He began by explaining what a derivative lets you do to a plain position.
“When you have an asset, most of the time people just invest in it and profit when prices go up and lose money when prices go down. With derivatives, you can adjust that profile,” he said. “For instance, you can limit the upside to get downside protection, or limit the upside to get a better yield or a fixed payback on the investment.”
The difficulty for an ordinary investor is sourcing those trades at all, a matter of know-how and access. A structured product removes this difficulty by packaging the pieces together.
“A structured product usually combines a strategy, a fixed-income part, an equity part, and a derivative part, into one single product that you can just buy, without having to bother with all the operational headaches around it,” he said.
What that provides the investor is control over risk.
“It’s mostly about risk transformation,” Loepfe added. “If you’re long an asset and you think it might have a pause in its upward trajectory, you can buy, for instance, a reverse convertible and profit from a coupon, a fixed amount of money that gives you some return on an asset you want to hold. You can also buy products with capital protection, so you don’t lose money, but you give up some of your upside potential. And you can have structured products where you profit from the downward movement of an underlying. So every kind of risk you want, you can transform with structured products.” A reverse convertible, in the simplest terms, pays the holder an enhanced coupon in exchange for taking on the risk that the underlying falls.
We then turned to why digital assets in particular suit this machinery. Spot crypto is volatile, and for a holder that is mostly a discomfort. For a structured product it is an input.
“For structured products there are two factors very beneficial for pricing,” Loepfe said. “One is volatility. The higher the volatility, the better the yield you can generate for a yield-enhancing structured product. The other is the dividend yield or interest yield on the underlying, which also gives you a better return on yield-enhancing products.”
For structured products there are two factors very beneficial for pricing. One is volatility. The higher the volatility, the better the yield you can generate for a yield-enhancing structured product. The other is the dividend yield or interest yield on the underlying.Patrick Loepfe
Digital assets score well on the first count and poorly on the second, since they carry no natural yield. He set out a way around that. “When you invest in digital assets, you can have your fixed-income leg in digital assets, which can help generate additional yield compared to risk-free rates on the usual global currencies.”
A Supply Problem, Not a Demand Problem
To explain why so few structured products exist on digital assets, we then brought in Florian Marty. Marty had joined GenTwo Digital as Managing Director six months earlier. The unit uses GenTwo’s infrastructure to let banks and asset managers wrap and issue off-balance-sheet structured products, actively managed certificates, and non-linear payoffs on digital assets, either as a traditional security or natively on chain.
Asked why the gap exists, Marty put the cause on one side of the market.
“I think we have a supply problem, not a demand problem,” he said. “Demand is there. We saw the numbers. Allocators want exposure, and the large majority are looking for a registered instrument rather than holding tokens directly. They don’t want the hassle of the tech side. They want a defined payoff with a floor or a coupon, and they just want one line in their custody statement.”
The constraint is one of supply, not demand, and it differs across jurisdictions. Where the constraint is tightest, it is capital: the cost to a bank of holding a position while a product remains outstanding. The next bottleneck is hedging. Issuers are reluctant to retain the embedded derivative risk, and must instead find counterparties prepared to sell the necessary options. In digital assets, such counterparties are still thin on the ground. The third consideration is reputational. Large institutions remain wary of the asset class. Regulation, Marty insisted, is not the problem.
On capital he had more to say.
“If a bank issues a structured product, they’ll hedge the position, and they usually issue on balance sheet,” Marty said. “So they hold a risk position on their balance sheet, and they need to hold some capital against it. Depending on the jurisdiction, this is rather expensive to almost impossible. Based on the Basel Committee recommendation for crypto positions, they suggest very high capital be allocated to on-balance-sheet crypto positions. On top of that, they recommend a cap, limiting the whole aggregated position on a bank’s balance sheet to around 1% of the bank’s core capital, which by definition is not expensive but rather prohibitive.”
It should be noted that this applies mostly in Europe, which has taken the Basel recommendation into its own capital rules. Uptake in other jurisdictions varies.
How to Increase Supply
We turned next to how these obstacles might be overcome. The mechanism, Marty explained, is not new.
“The mechanics are not new,” he said. “It would be a special purpose vehicle to issue structured products off balance sheet, through a legally isolated, bankruptcy-remote vehicle that holds the security, or sells it to the investor or the distributing bank, and hedges the position. The vehicle stands on its own and is not consolidated with anybody’s balance sheet, and with that, everybody has the possibility to issue products off balance sheet, so the capital requirements would not be applicable.” The charge falls away because the exposure never sits on a bank’s balance sheet to begin with.
With the vehicle in place, the full range of structured products becomes available on digital assets. “It basically opens up the whole familiar toolkit of structured products, now on digital assets,” Marty said. “You could structure every payoff that’s available today on equities or an index on a digital asset as well.”
We then asked Marty to describe that toolkit in more detail.
“To give some examples, there are for instance capital protected notes where investors get capital protection at maturity, full, conditional, or partial, and participate on the upside with the underlying up to a certain level. Then dual currency notes, a treasury product where you play two currency pairs, for example Bitcoin against USDT or the other way around, and depending on how the two develop you either get a yield or get converted to the other currency. Then yield enhancement products, where here in Switzerland the most famous are barrier reverse convertibles, a real workhorse. You get a fixed coupon and have a protection barrier, which essentially finances the coupon you get on a regular basis or at maturity. And lastly, the discount certificate, where investors want to get the underlying at a better price and are willing to give up part of the upside to get it cheaper.”
To make this more concrete, he then explained how GenTwo had orchestrated the issuance of two Bitcoin products, both in subscription at the time of the session. One was a capital protected note giving 90% protection with 80% participation on the upside and a cap at 150%, over a nine-month tenor, for an investor who expects Bitcoin to rise but fears a correction. The other was a barrier reverse convertible over three months, with a barrier at 80% and a coupon of 20% a year, paid whatever Bitcoin does, with the investment returned in full unless Bitcoin breaches the barrier, in which case the investor takes the cash equivalent plus the coupon.
Getting to a Mature Market
We closed by asking both our panelists to look ahead.
We first asked Marty what it would take for structured products on digital assets to become a real market. He gave three answers.
“We definitely need more issuers of structured products, that’s a wake-up call for all the institutions here,” he said, the willingness to issue being the first requirement. The second was the hedging market, where options providers exist but the largest players have yet to arrive, and whose entry would help the whole market grow. The third was a shift in attitude. “A change of mindset and openness to the digital asset class, and with that an additional appetite for reputational risk, because there’s no free lunch in the market,” he said. “You need to bring at least some appetite to the table if you want to enter this industry.”
We definitely need more issuers of structured products. We also need a change of mindset and openness to the digital asset class, and with that an additional appetite for reputational risk, because there’s no free lunch in the market.Florian Marty
We then asked Loepfe what use cases most excited him in this space.
“For digital assets, it’s quite the same as with traditional assets,” he said. “As an investor I could profit from all these different offering types, also in DeFi and staking and so on, but it would take me quite some effort to do the education on all those topics.”
The value of a structured product is that a professional does that work and packages the result.
“There are professionals who know these markets inside out and can combine the best of all worlds, the volatility of an underlying asset, the additional return of staking, and investments into DeFi protocols, into a product that’s eligible for more risk-averse investors, compared to those who just trade the cryptocurrencies directly. So there’s a lot we can do going forward.”
Sources
- Structured products market size and growth (global sales of about USD 1.85 trillion in 2025, up roughly a third on 2024; about USD 2.5 trillion outstanding worldwide; Switzerland the largest market at about CHF 309 billion; EMEA the fastest-growing region): Structured Retail Products (SRP) for global and US sales; Swiss National Bank and the Swiss Structured Products Association (SSPA) for Switzerland.
- Bitcoin ETF assets and market signals through the first half of 2026 (the USD 170 billion peak in late 2025, the near-30% fall, the low of about USD 78 billion in early June, positive net inflows, coin holdings near peak, and continued treasury buying): GenTwo, Structured Products on Digital Assets, white paper, July 2026, drawing ETF figures from SoSoValue. sosovalue.com/assets/etf/us-btc-spot
- Recovery by the time of the Summit (US spot Bitcoin ETF net assets near USD 100 billion, USD 99.05 billion on 26 August 2026, and Bitcoin in the high USD 70,000s): GenTwo market data, 31 August 2026, drawing on Bloomberg, Bitwise / VettaFi, ETF Action, and ETF Express.
- Institutional demand (roughly 73% of institutions plan to increase digital-asset allocations in 2026; 81% prefer a registered vehicle): Coinbase and EY-Parthenon, 2026 Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey, January 2026, 351 institutions. coinbase.com: 2026 Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey