Nomura Survey Finds 65% of Institutional Investors Now View Crypto as Essential Portfolio Tool

The world's largest institutional investors have made their position on cryptocurrency reasonably clear: it belongs in a diversified portfolio, alongside bonds, equities, and alternatives. A survey published on 19 April 2026 by Nomura's digital assets arm, Laser Digital, found that 65 percent of respondents now view digital assets as a vital portfolio diversifier — a figure that would have seemed implausible to most institutional risk managers as recently as 2023.

The survey, which Nomura and Laser Digital conducted among professional allocators, records a decisive shift in how the mainstream finance industry processes digital assets. What was once a fringe allocation discussed only in private family office forums has become, for many, a standard consideration in portfolio construction. The catalyst, according to the data, is not enthusiasm for the technology itself but something more procedural: regulatory clarity and the proliferation of regulated product wrappers that make digital asset exposure easier to execute without triggering compliance failures.

From Toxic to Tolerable

The institutional relationship with cryptocurrency has never been stable. In the 2017–2018 cycle, when Bitcoin first crossed five figures, some of the larger allocators began cautiously exploring exposure — only to retreat sharply after the market collapsed and FTX's 2022 implosion destroyed whatever residual goodwill existed toward crypto-native operators. For a period that ran through most of 2023, the dominant posture among pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth vehicles was frank avoidance. The asset class carried reputational risk, legal uncertainty, and a delivery infrastructure that sat awkwardly inside compliance-heavy investment mandates.

The Nomura survey suggests that calculation has changed. The precise mechanics differ by firm and jurisdiction, but the broad pattern is consistent: Bitcoin ETF approvals in the United States in early 2024 removed one of the most persistent structural barriers by providing an instrument that trades on regulated exchanges, clears through established custodians, and sits comfortably inside brokerage accounts designed for conventional securities. Ethereum ETF approvals followed. For an institutional manager operating under a fiduciary mandate, that distinction matters more than the philosophical case for decentralization.

The 65 percent figure does not mean two-thirds of all institutional capital is now deployed in digital assets. It means two-thirds of the allocators surveyed consider digital assets a legitimate component of portfolio construction — a question of authorization rather than deployment. Getting a strategy approved internally, at many institutions, remains a slower process than the market's expectations suggest.

The Regulatory Variable

Regulatory progress is the factor the survey cites most directly as the driver of improving sentiment. That is broadly consistent with observable developments: the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework has provided a harmonized legal footing across the bloc; Japan's Financial Services Agency has updated its licensing regime for digital asset custodians; and the UK's Financial Conduct Authority has cleared multiple pathways for institutional participation that did not exist three years ago.

The United States remains the most consequential jurisdiction for global capital flows, and here the picture is more contested. The administration that took office in January 2025 moved quickly to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and directed federal agencies to complete a crypto regulatory framework by mid-2026. Whether that framework produces the kind of durable clarity that allocators require — or whether it becomes another iteration of policy inconsistency — is a question the Nomura survey does not resolve.

The structural argument for institutional adoption has always run into the same practical wall: the asset class is volatile enough that its inclusion raises performance measurement problems under standard deviation frameworks, and illiquid enough in stressed markets that forced selling creates secondary disruptions. The survey's respondents appear to have decided that the risk is manageable — or, more likely, that the opportunity cost of being wrong has become larger than the risk of being early.

Structural Implications

If the survey reflects a durable shift rather than a cyclical uptick in sentiment, the downstream effects are substantial. A meaningful share of institutional capital that moves from zero allocation to even a modest strategic weight in digital assets — whether through direct holdings, tokenized securities, or the newly available wrappers — changes the market's composition. The investor base shifts from retail-dominated and crypto-native toward the kind of slow-moving, risk-averse capital that has historically stabilized markets at the cost of reducing their upside velocity.

This is the paradox of mainstream adoption: the process that validates an asset class also transforms its character. Digital asset markets were, for most of their history, driven by participants with high risk tolerance and a philosophical commitment to the underlying technology. Institutional adoption introduces counterparties who evaluate digital assets on the same terms as everything else in their portfolio — risk-adjusted return, correlation to existing holdings, and liquidity under drawdown. That changes price formation in ways that are not yet fully visible.

The firms best positioned to benefit from this transition are not the crypto-native exchanges and custodians that built the infrastructure. It is the large banks, prime brokers, and asset servicers who already have the relationships, compliance frameworks, and capital to deliver institutional-grade wrappers at scale. Nomura's own positioning through Laser Digital is a direct expression of this logic: the opportunity for a legacy financial institution is not to out-innovate crypto-native firms but to deliver digital asset services through channels that institutional clients already trust.

What Remains Uncertain

The Nomura survey records a shift in sentiment. It does not establish that the shift is complete, stable, or uniform across institutional types. The sources do not specify the survey sample size, response rate, or whether the cohort skews toward early adopters who are more favorably disposed to digital assets by definition. Pension funds and insurance companies — among the largest pools of long-duration capital — remain the most cautious segment of the institutional universe, and the survey's 65 percent figure should not be read as evidence that this capital is moving imminently.

The regulatory environment also remains genuinely uncertain. The frameworks referenced in the survey are either recently completed or still in development. A adverse regulatory ruling, a major security incident at a regulated custodian, or a sustained bear market would likely reverse the sentiment improvement the survey documents. The structural conditions that made crypto toxic to institutional allocators in 2022 and 2023 have not been removed — they have been partially obscured by a more favorable political and regulatory environment.

What the data does confirm is that the question of whether cryptocurrency belongs in institutional portfolios has been answered, at least provisionally, by the market itself. The next set of questions — how much, through what instrument, under what governance structure, and at what point in the market cycle — is where the institutional conversation will be won or lost. Those answers will arrive in the data on flows, not in surveys on sentiment.

This publication's coverage of institutional crypto adoption has tracked the arc from FTX's collapse through Bitcoin ETF approvals to the current Nomura data. The trajectory is real, but the structural barriers that precede every market transition deserve skepticism alongside the headline figure.