“There’s no doubt that the headwinds are disappearing… I think you’ll see more of this institutional adoption,” said Alex Pollak, head of UK and Israel at 21Shares, a Swiss cryptocurrency exchange traded product provider.
In the UK, pensions consultancy Cartwright said it had advised on its first bitcoin deal, with a small undisclosed £50 million pension scheme allocating about £1.5 million directly to bitcoin rather than through an ETF, in the hope that outsize returns might help plug its funding deficit.
Sam Roberts, director of investment consulting at Cartwright, said while the pensions industry was “slow moving” he expects this year to be “very interesting” in terms of schemes deciding to allocate more to crypto.
He said more than 50 individual savers had approached the consultancy saying they are not happy with their pensions provider and they would like their entire fund to be moved into crypto.
Cartwright has been speaking to two multiemployer pension funds about setting up a bitcoin fund for investors to opt into if they so choose, so that the funds would not lose members looking for crypto exposure.
“They could see a lot of members move to them… there would be a definite first-mover advantage,” said Roberts, who added that the discussions were still in early stages.
Australia’s AMP, which manages pension funds, has also used bitcoin to juice returns.
“This year AMP portfolios took the plunge and made a modest allocation to bitcoin futures,” said Steve Flegg, a senior portfolio manager at AMP. “We generally thought that even though crypto is risky, new and not yet fully proven, that it had become too big, and its potential was too great to continue to ignore.”
Still, funds allocating to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies remain a minority in the pensions industry, with consultants mostly reluctant to recommend exposure to their clients.
In December, the US Government Accountability Office warned crypto assets have “uniquely high volatility” after it identified 69 crypto asset investment options available to investors in retirement plans.
“We don’t think pensions funds should allocate to crypto—it’s highly volatile and we don’t see any robust valuation framework that can justify the value,” said Daniel Peters, a partner in Aon’s global investment practice, who added that a better way for pension funds to get exposure was through hedge funds with expertise and skill in the asset class.
“We fundamentally don’t think this should be part of a pension fund strategy for those reasons unless they are allocated via a specialist manager,” he said.
© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.
