By Israel Muñoz, Co-Organizer, Mita TechTalks & Partner, Base Layer Advisors
Two numbers tell two different stories about the same market. JPMorgan’s 2026 Global Family Office Report found that 89 percent of family offices carry zero crypto exposure, while prioritizing AI as their top investment theme. BNY Wealth’s study of single family offices, surveying a different segment, found that 74 percent were investing in or actively exploring digital assets, a 21 percent rise in a single year. Read together, those numbers describe a market that wants in. The capital already flowing through ETFs, corporate treasuries and dedicated venture funds is the first wave, not the whole story.
Citi’s 2026 Global Family Office Report shows what is holding back the next one. Nearly half of the 351 family offices surveyed see no significant barrier to allocating to digital assets, yet only 3 percent plan to increase their exposure, and more expect to reduce it than add to it. Where barriers exist, the biggest isn’t custody. It’s the lack of internal expertise and governance frameworks.
Two Gaps
The first gap is conviction, and it is a legitimate one. Allocators are still studying how Bitcoin behaves inside a portfolio: its volatility, its shifting correlation with equities, whether it diversifies when diversification matters most. JPMorgan tied its own caution to exactly those questions. That work is not a stall. It is how fiduciaries earn the right to size a position. 
The second gap is operational, and it persists even after conviction arrives. An individual holder can self-custody Bitcoin with a hardware wallet and a seed phrase. A fiduciary cannot. It has to answer questions an individual never faces: who can access the funds if the primary signer is incapacitated, how ownership passes to the next generation without a single point of failure, what the audit trail looks like for compliance, and where the position sits in an investment policy a board has approved. Citi found that most family offices are still building out tools such as investment policy statements to begin with. They are waiting on the same kind of institutional plumbing that already exists for every other asset class they hold.
That is why the survey numbers can all be true at once. Interest has outpaced both the portfolio thesis and the infrastructure needed to act on it responsibly.
The Infrastructure Being Built to Close It
That plumbing is arriving faster than most people tracking this space realize. AnchorWatch operates as a Lloyd’s of London coverholder, insuring Bitcoin held in collaborative multisig vaults. In July, it launched Multi-Institution Custody, which splits signing authority across three independent firms (AnchorWatch, BitGo and CoinCorner) so that no single institution can move funds or lose them on its own. Gannett Trust, chartered in Wyoming and backed by Unchained, became the first regulated Bitcoin-native trust company, built to deliver the fiduciary services institutions already expect: qualified custody, succession planning, and continuity of ownership across generations.
The credit layer is maturing too. Zaria, founded by veterans of SVB and NYDIG, is building the servicing and collateral-agent infrastructure that lets Bitcoin function as institutional collateral, and served as backup servicer on Ledn’s rated Bitcoin-backed securitization. In Mexico, ArcadiaB, operating since 2017 and building the country’s first publicly listed Bitcoin treasury company, offers peso loans collateralized by Bitcoin, giving holders liquidity without forcing a sale.
OranjeBTC is approaching the same gap from the treasury side, with Sam Callahan leading strategy and research on how corporations and family offices structure Bitcoin holdings responsibly. None of these companies existed in this form five years ago. All of them are solving a version of the same problem: giving a fiduciary a way to hold Bitcoin that satisfies a board, not just a technically inclined individual.
Capital is backing that infrastructure directly, through a growing number of Bitcoin-focused venture funds.
Ego Death Capital closed a $100 million second fund in 2025, backed in large part by family offices, to invest in companies building Bitcoin’s application and infrastructure layer, on the premise that Bitcoin is something to build on rather than something to trade. Epoch VC, a Denver-based fund dedicated entirely to Bitcoin infrastructure and financial technology, is underwriting the same thesis.
If the Tools Exist, Why Hasn’t More Money Moved Yet?
The fair pushback is that having a solution and having a proven solution are not the same thing. Insurance capacity for Bitcoin custody, even through a market as deep as Lloyd’s, is still small relative to the balance sheets that family offices and larger institutional allocators are considering. A handful of companies with a few years of track record is a thinner foundation than the decades of history behind a traditional qualified custodian. Fiduciaries are conservative by design, and reasonably so.
Then there is career risk, and it cuts one way. A CIO who allocates to Bitcoin and is wrong owns the outcome; one who stays underweight and misses the move rarely does. Until peers and consultants see a Bitcoin allocation as defensible rather than contrarian, that asymmetry will keep capital on the sidelines, however good the custody.
That caution is rational. Every institutional market innovation, from ETFs to prime brokerage, went through the same sequence: infrastructure had to exist and operate cleanly for a period before large allocators trusted it with real weight. Bitcoin is simply earlier on that curve. Each insured, audited, successfully executed succession event closes part of the trust gap, the same way it did for every asset class that came before.
What Moves the Next Wave
The custody decisions being made now will determine which providers institutions trust as allocations grow. But custody alone won’t move the next wave. That depends on several things maturing together: governance frameworks that give Bitcoin a defined place in an investment policy, risk management that treats its volatility as a sizing question rather than a disqualifier, custody and insurance with multi-cycle track records, and enough peer adoption that allocating stops being a career risk. A specific set of builders understood this well before the survey data put a figure on it.
Institutional Bitcoin adoption isn’t stalled. It’s being underwritten, one policy, one custody arrangement and one investment committee at a time. The allocators who move first will be the ones who did that work early and found partners they were willing to trust.
Israel brings together analytical expertise and hands-on experience across Bitcoin, fintech, and early-stage investing. An early participant in the Bitcoin space, he co-founded a remittance startup pioneering cross-border payments. His career spans the startup ecosystem, from helping launch 500 Startups’ Miami operation to working as a stockbroker at Avenue, a new brokerage serving international clients. He is an investor in early-stage ventures in Bitcoin infrastructure and insurance, as well as climate technology. Israel is a partner at Base Layer Advisors, a consultancy where he connects investors with opportunities in Bitcoin companies and Bitcoin-focused venture capital funds. He co-hosts the Build With Bitcoin podcast, launched in April 2024 with Lynne Bairstow, where they explore Bitcoin as a transformative technology protocol.
