On Thursday, the decades-old wall separating US retirement accounts from direct crypto exposure came down — and the potential capital inflow is staggering. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that will open 401(k) retirement plans to a broader range of alternative assets, including private equity, real estate, and — for the first time — crypto assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
In 2022, the DOL went further, stating that adding crypto to a 401(k) could be interpreted as a failure to meet the required fiduciary standard of professional care. The message was unambiguous: providers who failed to meet that standard could be held personally liable for any losses. This effectively froze the market before it began. “401(k) providers had to decide if adding crypto to plans was worth the risk of DOL scrutiny. Most didn’t,” Rasmussen explained. The chilling effect was immediate — sponsors backed off, firms paused crypto-linked retirement products, and investors “missed out on life-changing returns.”
By mid-2025, however, the tide had turned. Mounting legal pressure, pushback from 401(k) providers, and Congressional criticism of regulatory overreach led the DOL to rescind its “extreme caution” guidance in full. More strikingly, the agency admitted that its 2022 approach was a deviation from its historically neutral treatment of investment strategies. As Rasmussen put it, “Once again, the US government admitted it had singled out crypto.”
“Every 2 weeks, a portion of their paychecks are routed directly into purchasing a mixture of stocks and bonds… This is a HUGE driver of the equity market run and resilience over the past 20 years. A constant background bid for assets.” With around $50 billion entering these funds biweekly, even a modest portfolio allocation to crypto — 1%, 3%, or 5% — could create recurring inflows of $120 billion to $600 billion annually. “And these aren’t one-time flows. THEY KEEP BUYING ONCE ALLOCATIONS ARE SET,” Dunleavy emphasized.
Jan Happel and Yann Allemann, the founders of Glassnode and Swissblock, are already calling the move a watershed for mainstream adoption. They remarked via X, “People don’t realize yet how big today’s news has been for crypto… this will be seen as the watershed moment for mainstream adoption, much more than the ETF.”
As Dunleavy summed it up, with 401(k)s and direct asset trusts in place, the policy “put[s] a ridiculous floor under crypto going forward and move[s] the limit from the moon to Jupiter.”
At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $3.82 trillion.
