Perspectives from Family Offices, HNWIs and Asset Managers

This report, authored by Aspen Digital with contributions from SBI Digital Markets and Family Office Association of Hong Kong, provides an in-depth insight into the current perspectives of the private wealth industry on investing in digital assets. The report also looks at investors’ portfolio allocation, key sectors within digital assets, opportunities and challenges they perceive in the digital asset space.

The report is based on a survey of more than 80 family offices (FO), high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and asset managers in Asia conducted in the second half of 2024 and includes in-depth discussions with survey respondents and other stakeholders.

The private wealth sector is increasing their allocation into digital assets and our survey uncovered that 76% of respondents are already investing, compared to 58% of our last study with KPMG in 2022. The main reason for the growing interest is still largely influenced by the potential upside, while other use cases have emerged as additional reasons to include as part of the overall portfolio.

The digital asset landscape is constantly evolving with new sectors and narratives. The survey shows growing interest in decentralised finance (DeFi), artificial intelligence (AI) and decentralised physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and real-world asset tokenisation (RWA), highlighting their growing importance in driving Web 3 mass adoption. While the asset class is still nascent, regulatory concerns, poor user experience and fragmented landscape appeared to be the key obstacles for many participants.

The approval of the Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in 2024 has brought billions of fresh capital to the digital asset space. Despite the recent market volatility, the private wealth sector remains bullish for the longer term and 31% of our respondents predicted Bitcoin price to reach at least USD 100k by the end of Q4 2024.