Share This Article
Crypto.com launched a mixed-asset IRA today. But the real story is the land grab happening underneath it.
Crypto.com rolled out an individual retirement account for U.S. users today, combining crypto and equities in a single tax-advantaged wrapper. It supports Traditional and Roth IRAs, covers more than 400 digital assets alongside stocks and ETFs, and includes staking on select tokens with rewards flowing directly into the retirement account.
The incentive stack is aggressive: up to 5% contribution matching on new deposits, up to 2% on transfers and rollovers, and no account fees. That is pricing designed to pull capital from incumbents and lock in the kind of long-duration balances that exchanges have historically struggled to retain.
But Crypto.com is not operating in a vacuum here. This is a land grab, and the competition is serious.
The retirement race is on
Fidelity launched its own crypto IRA back in April 2025, offering direct exposure to bitcoin, ether, and litecoin through its digital assets subsidiary with no fees and cold storage custody. Then in October, Morgan Stanley dropped all restrictions on crypto fund access for wealth clients. The $1.5 million asset minimum and aggressive risk profile requirement vanished overnight. All account types, including IRAs and 401(k)s, became eligible. Advisors were cleared to pitch BlackRock and Fidelity bitcoin funds to anyone.
What makes Crypto.com’s version interesting is the “mixed-asset” angle. Fidelity’s crypto IRA is crypto-only, requiring a separate brokerage IRA as a funding account. Morgan Stanley’s expansion works through conventional wealth management rails. Neither gives you stocks and 400+ tokens in one place with staking built in. For crypto-native users, that consolidation matters.
The regulatory unlock
All of this sits on top of a policy shift that has moved faster than most people realise.
In May 2025, the Department of Labor rescinded Biden-era guidance that told 401(k) fiduciaries to exercise “extreme care” before adding crypto. The DOL said that standard went beyond ERISA’s actual requirements and returned to a neutral, facts-and-circumstances approach.
Then on August 7, Trump signed an executive order directing the DOL, SEC, and Treasury to open retirement plans to alternative assets including crypto for more than 90 million Americans in employer-sponsored plans. Within five days, the DOL had rescinded additional restrictive guidance. In October, Rep. Troy Downing introduced the Retirement Investment Choice Act to make the shift permanent by law.
The barriers that kept crypto out of retirement accounts for years have been dismantled in under 12 months.
Why this matters
U.S. retirement assets total roughly $45.8 trillion. IRAs alone hold about $18 trillion. Even a modest allocation shift toward crypto would dwarf the spot ETF inflows that dominated 2024 and 2025.
Retirement money is also structurally different from exchange trading volume. It is stickier, less reactive to daily volatility, and compounds over longer time horizons. That is exactly the kind of capital crypto needs to mature as an asset class, and exactly the kind of capital that rewards patient holders rather than short-term traders.
The fact that Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, and now Crypto.com are all building products around this thesis tells you something important: the institutions are not debating whether crypto belongs in retirement portfolios anymore. They are competing over who gets to hold it.