In our opening session we established that institutional demand for digital assets has remained strong despite the latest crypto winter, but that there is a lack of supply of the kind of sophisticated structured products they are used to. For most investors, access still means spot exposure. The structured products familiar in other asset classes remain scarce.
In our third session we took a deeper dive into this supply gap in general, and from the point of view of independent asset managers and their end clients. Florian Marty mapped the conventional structured-products market: its size, its limited migration into digital assets, and what would need to change. Gabriele Gentile supplied the client’s perspective: where demand resides, where it is checked, and what follows when investors are left to navigate the asset class unaided.
We then returned to the products themselves: what an asymmetric payoff can do that spot cannot, why Gentile would start with Bitcoin alone, and what still must be solved before an investor can take Bitcoin risk without inheriting the rest of crypto’s complications.
Florian Marty is Managing Director of GenTwo Digital. Gabriele Gentile is Managing Partner at Capital Finance and Bravo Company, a Swiss regulated asset manager.
The Market That Already Exists
We began with a look at structured products and the traditional structured products market.
Echoing what Patrick Loepfe had said in our opening session, Marty explained that a structured product is non-linear. Spot Bitcoin produces a straight line: a 10% rise in Bitcoin means a 10% gain, a 50% fall, a 50% loss. A structured product divides that line into segments. Its payoff need not track the underlying one for one, allowing an investor to specify a different result: a coupon in a sideways market, a defined worst case, or more or less participation on the way up. The manufacturer combines the components. The investor buys a single security which is held as one line in a custody account.
The market’s scale may surprise those coming to it from crypto. Global retail sales were about USD 1.85 trillion in 2025, roughly a third higher than in 2024. Outstanding notional at year-end was around USD 2.5 trillion, spread across more than 750,000 live products.
“So structured products are definitely not a niche product,” Marty said. The principal hubs are Asia-Pacific, EMEA and the Americas. Asia-Pacific is the largest, with roughly USD 1.1 trillion outstanding, followed by EMEA at USD 730 billion and the Americas at around USD 680 billion. All three grew over the past year, by between 11% and 23%.
The regional markets also differ in character. Switzerland, where the products originated, favors structures with little or no downside protection and remains the world’s largest single market. In Asia-Pacific, more than 80% of volume is concentrated in autocalls. The Americas relies more heavily on indices, where the other regions favor single stocks and baskets. Volatility is the common raw material, which helps explain why Nvidia was last year’s most traded underlying, and why digital assets are attracting attention.
Digital Assets’ Missing Layer
For all its scale, the structured-products market has barely reached digital assets.
As Marty put it, “we see various products available on the linear side, such as ETFs and ETPs on one or multiple digital assets, but nothing on the non-linear side. So no capital-protected ETP or autocallable ETP on Bitcoin, for example.”
There are non-linear products at the asset class’s edges: structures written on futures, or on ETFs that track a digital asset rather than on the asset itself. But these remain small and indirect. GenTwo has been more active behind the scenes, arranging dual-currency notes and accumulators on Bitcoin, and bonus certificates on Ethereum, for clients in recent months. The firm had also put two Bitcoin products into subscription with partners the day before the Summit began. The Market Making chapter describes them in more detail.
Marty was careful to qualify the figures. They capture only the public market. “All the numbers I mentioned before are based on publicly available data, publicly issued products, and this is only half of the truth,” he said. “There is a whole other business going on, products that are privately placed, bilaterally traded, never listed, never reported.”
There is an equivalent private market in equities. In digital assets, Marty believes, it is proportionately larger, as issuers and providers quietly develop tailored offerings with clients.
What Would It Take?
Marty identified three requirements for further growth. The first is a larger group of issuers, willing and able to manufacture non-linear digital-asset products. That would allow clients to compare prices. The second is a deeper hedging market. An issuer needs to buy the option embedded in a product, and benefits from competing quotes.
The third is a change of posture among the large global issuers. They can manage the credit and market risks, Marty argued. The open question is whether they are prepared to accept the reputational risk.
Capital treatment is a further constraint. Particularly in Europe, it can make it uneconomic for banks to carry digital assets on their balance sheets. The Opportunity chapter considers that problem in more detail.
The Resistance Is Closer to Home
We then turned to Gentile to take the client-side view. As both a conventional asset manager adding crypto to traditional portfolios and a discretionary manager of crypto mandates, he sees the hesitant newcomer and the already-committed investor.
“Now that we are about to start a new cycle in crypto, something seems to be changing,” Gentile pointed out. “Up to the last cycle, what I usually saw was the client coming and asking should I be looking at Bitcoin? Does it make sense for me? Today I think the causality should be the other way around. The advisor should be the one originating the question, the one bringing crypto to the client, just like we would bring any other asset class or investment idea.”
For Gentile, clients are not the main obstacle.
I’ve never had a client refuse a small allocation to crypto when I proposed it. It’s never happened. No matter the age, no matter the background. So from what I see, the demand is there, and it can also be stimulated. The end client is not really the problem on the demand side.Gabriele Gentile
Instead, he maintains that there is a bottleneck to crypto adoption, and it lies inside the advisory community.
“Financial professionals are very, very reluctant to recommend crypto. If I look at the market more broadly, and this is my number, there’s no study behind it, from my experience I would say fewer than one in ten asset managers are genuinely open to crypto, and probably fewer than one in twenty really understand crypto. That’s a big problem.”
He suggested that this reluctance arises partly from the technology itself and partly from an inversion of the customary relationship between advisor and client.
“By definition it’s decentralized. That changes the relationship between the advisor and the client,” Gentile said. “In traditional finance the advisor is usually the one who knows more. In crypto, very often it’s the client who knows more about the asset than the advisor. So some advisors are uncomfortable with that.”
What Happens When Advice Stops
Turning clients away from crypto does not necessarily keep them out of the market. It may simply leave them to navigate it without the advice they sought.
Gentile used an analogy from home to describe what becomes of a client who is turned away.
“If my sixteen-year-old daughter wants to go to the nightclub and I say no, what do you think the result is? She will go to the nightclub. She will sneak out and she will go alone. That’s more dangerous. I lost the opportunity to talk to her, to guide her, to tell her not to trust the wrong people, not to get into cars she shouldn’t get into. The client is the same. They go to their trusted advisor, the advisor says we don’t do that, it’s too risky, and the client says okay, we don’t do that. But then he goes to his cousin’s friend who knows about crypto, gives him the private keys, and invests in the new Bitcoin that is going to do a thousand x over the next six months. Spoiler alert, it won’t happen. So by refusing to engage with crypto we don’t necessarily stop the client from investing, we simply deny him or her professional advice.”
The alternative is paralysis. Gentile argued that volatility does the damage here, though in a different way from the usual account.
“Timing the volatility is huge, so you need some experience with the markets, and you’re alone, so the entry point and the entry timing are quite difficult,” Gentile said. “It becomes emotional, it gets amplified, and then the client says, okay, it’s too late. Then finally there’s a correction, 25%, and he says, now it’s going to zero. So the client becomes paralyzed. Prices are rising, he doesn’t invest. Prices are going down, he doesn’t invest. The problem is not volatility. It’s volatility without guidance. Most of the time the client just wants guidance, just wants to feel that he’s not alone.”
Beyond Spot
Advice is part of the answer. The instrument is another. We returned to Marty to ask what an asymmetric product can offer that spot cannot.
It allows an investor, or an asset manager acting on an investor’s view, to define a desired return profile. A belief that markets will move sideways can be turned into a coupon. A belief that the market has risen far enough, and that the investor now wants a floor, can become a capital-protected note. The risk-management function is built into the instrument. It still requires a view.
“It requires a dialogue between the investor and the asset manager,” Marty said.
His example, a capital-protected Bitcoin note with a 90% floor and capped participation above the strike, is the live product discussed in The Opportunity chapter and examined again in Market Making. Its central trade-off is simple. The floor is paid for by giving up some upside.
The exact terms move with volatility. Protection that supports 80% participation today may support only 60% in two months if volatility rises, or more if it falls.
Bitcoin First
In preparing for the session, Gentile had said that a newcomer need care only about Bitcoin. We asked him why.
“Yes, that was very extreme, but I’ll tell you why. If you’re talking about investing in crypto, Bitcoin is the starting point. It’s like investing in global equities without having the US. You have to start somewhere. You don’t have the S&P. I wouldn’t build exposure to altcoins without having Bitcoin as the core of the allocation, that’s for sure.”
The point concerned both sequencing and time, including the risk of backing the wrong technology.
“Bitcoin is the asset where you can build a long-term HODL position, something you may hold for decades, even generations,” Gentile said. “Altcoins are different. We are talking about technologies, and technologies can be replaced. You can be absolutely right about the trend and still bet on the wrong horse. Imagine the late 1990s. You could see mobile phones and be completely right that mobile technology was going to change the world, but you probably bought Nokia, not Xiaomi or Samsung. That’s the risk we see with altcoins over the long term. You can correctly identify the future and still choose the wrong technology to represent that future. With Bitcoin, it’s different. The asset is blockchain technology applied to the monetary system, and it’s the only asset I’m betting will still be there in 20 or 50 years.”
Pressed on whether other tokens improve a portfolio, he returned to liquidity and diversification.
“Sometimes something happens with a smaller token and liquidity disappears. The smaller ones are not suitable for a long-term investment. And I’d remind you that about 75% of the market is Bitcoin and Ethereum,” Gentile said. “If you add Bitcoin to a traditional portfolio, even a small allocation, say 2% or 3%, your Sharpe ratio, your risk-adjusted metrics, improve, because over a medium- to long-term horizon Bitcoin has historically provided diversification benefits. What is interesting is that once Bitcoin is already in the portfolio, adding altcoins doesn’t necessarily provide much additional diversification benefit. So if my objective is portfolio construction rather than speculation, Bitcoin has already done most of the job.”
What Sits Behind It
We asked Gentile what made him hesitate about the products already on offer. The first issue was timing. At almost any price, there is an argument for waiting. At USD 80,000, forecasts turn to USD 50,000 or USD 45,000. At USD 16,000, the prediction is USD 8,000. At USD 120,000, attention shifts to USD 200,000.
A structured product can reduce some of that uncertainty by setting an investor’s exposure in advance. Gentile’s concern was what it adds in return. An ETF, ETP, or note may simplify access to Bitcoin, but it also relies on an issuer, a custodian, derivatives counterparties, and the systems that bind them together.
“You can take the old infrastructure and use an ETF or an ETP, or go to Chicago for the options, and apply the old infrastructure to the crypto space,” he said. “You have to go a step further. Custody risk, counterparty risk, credit risk, technology risk. That’s still a different dimension in the crypto space. We’re talking about private keys here.”
His point was not that a structured product could remove counterparty risk altogether. It cannot. The task, rather, is to identify those risks, limit them where possible, and manage them explicitly, rather than exchange the practical demands of direct ownership for an opaque chain of financial claims.
“If I invest in a structured product on Bitcoin, I don’t want counterparty risk. I don’t want credit risk,” he said. “I’m investing in Bitcoin because I don’t want credit risk.”
Gentile wanted more than a firm capable of issuing a note.
“I don’t just need someone who can print the note. That’s kind of easy,” he said. “I need someone who understands and can manage the whole infrastructure behind it.”