Amy Oldenburg, head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley, says client education — not product design — is the central challenge facing bitcoin adoption at the firm and across the industry.

Morgan Stanley launched its bitcoin exchange-traded product, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), into a market it believes is still in its infancy. 

At a panel on Wednesday moderated by Tyler Evans, Amy Oldenburg, the bank's head of digital assets, spent the better part of an hour making a case for bitcoin that few clients have heard in full, and said that gap is the industry's most urgent problem.

"We have to start with bitcoin," Oldenburg told the audience, citing the asset's roughly 1.5 trillion dollar market cap and its distance from the rest of the crypto landscape. 

She was careful to draw a line between bitcoin and crypto as a broad category, a distinction she said most retail and institutional clients still do not make with confidence. The firm wants to see that distinction anchored in fundamental research, not just narrative.