Morgan Stanley Digital Asset Head: Bitcoin Reaching $1 Million Wouldn't Be Surprising, But a True Breakout May Require a Crisis That Shatters the Old System

Compiled & Edited by: Odaily TechFlow

Guest: Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy at Morgan Stanley

Host: Natalie Brunell

Podcast Source: Natalie Brunell

Original Title: When Will Bitcoin Hit a New ATH? Wall Street Insider Explains

Air Date: June 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

Morgan Stanley, managing trillions of dollars in assets, is now pushing Bitcoin toward its clients. In this conversation, Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy, reveals a paradox: MSBT set a record for the firm's best ETF first-day launch, yet most financial advisors remain reluctant to recommend it to clients, primarily because Bitcoin's price has largely been range-bound since the recommendation was made. She doesn't believe the next big surge will come from a new product or policy catalyst but may require an event that truly shatters the traditional financial system, with Bitcoin standing as the only intact asset. She wouldn't be surprised to see Bitcoin break $1 million within five years, though she hopes the rise is gradual.

Key Insights Summary

Technological Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

• "At every stage of my life, I was surrounded by technological changes that seemed incredibly obscure and faced overwhelming skepticism at the time. It's only now that I can clearly see how the entire historical puzzle pieces together."
• "The seasoned traders and market participants I dealt with daily as counterparties stuck with me all the way through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial tsunami together, and it was the core of that group who later became some of the earliest hardcore Bitcoin buyers."
• "Bitcoin's earliest evangelists and power users came not just from Silicon Valley's geek circles, but in large numbers from cross-border and international financial markets – those who were on the trading front lines, desperately seeking alternatives to the traditional centralized banking system."

Why Bitcoin Made Sense Early On

• "In those underdeveloped markets, traditional brick-and-mortar banking systems were extremely lagging. The vast majority of ordinary people could never open a bank account in their lifetime, so they relied entirely on and embraced mobile money."
• "You're in a small village where electricity isn't even available 24/7, surrounded by dirt roads, and there's a Vodafone kiosk that looks like a lemonade stand, with 'M-Pesa' written on it – that's where you put cash onto your phone."
• "Because we were deeply involved in so many emerging markets, we knew firsthand that people there had every reason to embrace decentralization. The traditional financial infrastructure was incredibly unreliable, lacked any semblance of contractual integrity, and was often accompanied by severe systemic corruption. We experienced these dark realities firsthand at the trading desk."

Why Haven't Institutional Investors Gone All-In on Bitcoin?

• "Our entire group is classified as a bank holding company. This means we must adhere to a much stricter set of capital adequacy and risk control requirements specific to the banking system – because we have the Federal Reserve firmly overseeing us."

Record Demand for MSBT

• "Of course, you champion your own product, but you never truly know what will happen until it goes live. The results surprised many."
• "Combining a GSIB-grade issuer with GSIB-grade custody was our primary goal for the first product we wanted to bring to market. It was also a way for us to understand what else the ecosystem needs to develop."

Will Morgan Stanley Issue Digital Credit?

• "I know there's something there in digital credit, but most people haven't even figured out Bitcoin yet, let alone more advanced products built on top of it."
• "Education is the factor limiting the community, limiting the financial advisor community from engaging with these products."
• "Certain elements of some products are very compelling, but there's always something that prevents it from fitting together perfectly – a bit like the early story of BlackBerry."

The Advisor Gap: Why Isn't Everyone Recommending Bitcoin?

• "If we had issued the recommendation at $10,000 or $15,000, and it later ran up to $100,000, the momentum would naturally be behind us. But interestingly, since the recommendation, we've mostly been trading sideways in a range."
• "Financial advisors have a fiduciary duty to select appropriate assets for their clients. Not every client is a growth investor."

What's Holding Bitcoin Back?

• "We always get caught up in binary debates: Will Bitcoin succeed or fail? But we live in a very complex world where various narratives are intermingled, diverting attention and allocation."
• "The attention and liquidity for global mainstream capital in asset allocation are brutally fragmented."
• "I hate to say it, but it might actually take a crisis – one where we shatter the existing system, and Bitcoin is the only thing left intact."

Corporate Balance Sheets

• "Banks don't hold Bitcoin because they dislike it, but because there are more capital-efficient assets. If capital regulations don't change, we'll focus our energy on those more favorable assets."
• "If no one really needs tokenized stocks, we have little reason to spend significant money doing it. If demand comes, we'll do it. The same logic applies to Bitcoin."

The Future of Bitcoin

• "I don't think we'll see a magical J-curve that takes off in 2027. It's more likely we'll continue a slow grind higher, with more participants gradually entering, getting educated, and slowly understanding."
• "Bitcoin reaching one million dollars? Great, I see nothing impossible about it. From everything I've witnessed in my life, I believe anything is possible."

Winner-Takes-All Tech vs. Redundant Finance: The Future of the Industry

• "That 'winner-takes-all' culture you see in tech and many tech-adjacent fields doesn't align with financial services at all. The essence of financial services is redundancy and having many participants."
• "When we run an RFP, we might start with a list of over a dozen, hoping to narrow it down to three finalists. But in the tech space, often only one or maybe two can truly meet our hard requirements."

Addressing Skepticism Towards Big Banks

• "In emerging markets, the 'distrust' of the traditional, official financial system by ordinary people isn't some abstract theory in a textbook. It's a bleeding, raw reality they face every day."
• "From the perspective of a die-hard Bitcoin believer, taking spot Bitcoin and placing it into a traditional financial institution's ETP is heresy in many people's eyes. Yet, it's happening at a scale I didn't anticipate."
• "Holding an ETP share isn't the same as holding Bitcoin. You own price exposure. This needs to be reiterated constantly through education."

Technological Roots: From the 1999 Tech Bubble to Emerging Markets

Host Natalie Brunell: Our guest today is Amy Oldenburg, Head of Digital Assets Strategy at Morgan Stanley. Amy, I'm particularly interested in hearing how you got involved with Bitcoin and your over two-decade legendary career at Morgan Stanley.

Amy Oldenburg:

I've been at Morgan Stanley for twenty-six years, though it wasn't my plan. I grew up in a small Midwestern town in Ohio. The funny thing is – just like you asked me during our pre-show chat: 'How exactly did you end up here? How did you get on this crazy digital asset and Bitcoin journey?'

Like you, I'm a deep Gen Xer, and I resonate so much with your experiences. Sometimes, looking at those online memes about how kids grew up in the 80s and 90s, you realize technology started reshaping us subtly very early in life. I remember being seven or eight, spending hours in the basement with my cousins playing Atari, and then the NES came out, and Super Mario Bros. blew our minds. It feels like every key juncture in my life was accompanied by a disruptive technological wave.

One Christmas, my dad bought us a Tandy computer, and we started tinkering with early computer games – it felt unbelievable. Then tech just kept accelerating. We were learning basic typing in high school computer labs, and by college, technology was cutting deeper into our daily lives.

I remember a professor who got early access to a BlackBerry. Our entire marketing class became its seed users. We sat in class, completely clueless about what it could be used for – it didn't even have apps, it was basically a brick of hardware. We joked, 'Okay, how is this different from a high school pager? It can send letters and numbers, but none of our friends have one, so who are we even paging?' Then it evolved into the version with the iconic full keyboard, was ubiquitous for a while, and then was suddenly obsolete.

Even funnier was my major in college. I was studying accounting, but the school wouldn't let accounting majors do exchange programs abroad. Back then, all I wanted was to escape Ohio – the farther, the better. I would have happily gone overseas. Since I couldn't go abroad, the next best thing was a domestic exchange program in San Francisco. Because I was studying in New York, in 1999, I packed my bags for San Francisco – and landed right in the middle of the peak Dot-com Bubble.

Young and naive, I had no idea how crazy the world I entered was. In Silicon Valley, I started working at an internet startup the next day, helping Fortune 500 companies build websites. After two months of paid internship, I decisively dropped my accounting major, gave up my major entirely. The feeling was just too intense – the technological change happening was absolutely going to disrupt the future profoundly.

Back then, we followed the company to various industry conferences. Google was just a small startup at the time; they could only put up a small slip of paper at conferences to recruit, saying, 'If interested, please visit our Craigslist page to apply for a job at Google.' We raised an eyebrow: 'Google? What kind of name is that? The business model makes no sense – who would use it to search for things? It'll never succeed.'

So you see, at every stage of my life, I was surrounded by technological changes that seemed incredibly obscure and faced overwhelming skepticism at the time. It's only now that I can clearly see how the entire historical puzzle pieces together.

As for how I eventually entered digital assets and Bitcoin – I actually moved to Morgan Stanley after the Dot-com Bubble burst. I stayed with that San Francisco startup when it burst, later transferring back to New York headquarters for full-time work. But everyone knew the environment had completely collapsed – we were even forced to withdraw our S-1 filing, failed to go public, and were immediately followed by two brutal rounds of layoffs. I had to activate Plan B immediately because I needed to pay rent – and there was no way I was going back to Ohio.

It was at that critical juncture that I stumbled into Morgan Stanley. A close friend of mine worked in HR there. She came to me and said, 'I know you're not interested in traditional finance right now, totally focused on tech. But I have tons of positions that need filling urgently. If you know anyone looking for a job or wanting to interview, send them my way.' I thought to myself, why don't I give it a try myself, at least keep my options open.

So, I crossed over into Morgan Stanley's Emerging Markets team. The aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis (1997) hadn't fully dissipated, and the Tequila Crisis (1994) was also recent history – the entire emerging markets landscape was a mess. The team I joined had changed leadership several times in just a few years. We were also feeling the severe impact of the tech bubble burst on financial assets – this was around 2000, 2001. Then, dramatically, just nine months into my tenure, 9/11 happened. That period was one crisis after another, while underlying technological change was progressing crazily in parallel.

During my time at Morgan Stanley, I spent several years on the trading desk, specializing in Programmatic Trading and Emerging Markets FX Trading. The seasoned traders and market participants I dealt with daily as counterparties stuck with me all the way through the 2008 global financial crisis. We weathered that financial tsunami together, and it was the core of that group who later became some of the earliest hardcore Bitcoin buyers.

Bitcoin's earliest evangelists and power users came not just from Silicon Valley's geek circles, but in large numbers from cross-border and international financial markets – those who were on the trading front lines, desperately seeking alternatives to the traditional centralized banking system.

Because we were deeply involved in so many emerging markets, we knew firsthand that people there had every reason to embrace decentralization. The traditional financial infrastructure was incredibly unreliable, lacked any semblance of contractual integrity, and was often accompanied by severe systemic corruption. We experienced these dark realities firsthand at the trading desk.

So, it was precisely through this front-line financial trading experience, combined with my early network in the tech scene (like friends who were early pioneers of peer-to-peer music file sharing/P2P software), that I became extremely sensitive to and made very early contact with Bitcoin. Those skills in digital trading and risk resistance from back then later transitioned very smoothly into the digital assets space.

Why Bitcoin Made Sense Early On

Host Natalie Brunell: Since you got involved in this space so early, did you invest early yourself, or did you sit on the sidelines until traditional financial institutions formally entered and the entire industry became compliant?

Amy Oldenburg:

Not really. It's funny, my brother was over last week, and we were reminiscing – it was around 2012, he was excited and came to me, wanting to get a few machines to mine Bitcoin. I outright laughed at him, saying we didn't have hardware powerful enough at home to set up a mining rig.

And you have to understand, the crypto environment back then was incredibly risky and dangerous – nothing like today, where you just download a sleek Coinbase app and can safely deposit and withdraw Bitcoin with a few clicks in a browser. Honestly, back then, if you wanted to buy coins, your only option was to deal with a sketchy operation like Mt.Gox. And I worked at Morgan Stanley, thinking: if I dared touch this stuff, I'd probably get fired the next day. For me, the compliance risk and operational cost were too high. So, while I followed it intensely and spent a huge amount of time observing its evolution from the sidelines, I was definitely not one of those early hardcore miners coding in front of their computers.

Host Natalie Brunell: