Is this the beginning of the end of the "manual" investor?

2026-03-20

Everyone is talking about the new SEC/CFTC guidance as a win for crypto. What's more intriguing is thinking about the guidance in the context of the early agentic era we're living in.

We aren't just seeing a change in asset classification; this guidance might someday be looked back on as the true birth of an agentic personal finance movement.

For years, "sophisticated" investing was gated because the plumbing was too complex for a human to manage alone. You needed a team at an RIA (/family office/etc.) to handle the compliance, the drawdowns, and the rebalancing. Everyone was tethered to T+2 settlement cycles, manual KYC refreshes, and discretionary "gatekeeper" approvals. But as the regulators shift more (most?) digital assets into the commodity and utility buckets, the legacy legal toll booths…they are disappearing…which amounts to a radical shift in the financial services landscape.

Is the RIA model (or any other financial services intermediary role, really) ready for a world where the investor's digital employee has equal access to what was formerly institutional-only?

It's a good reminder that there is a case for all finserv companies to be proactively working right now to redefine their own relevance to customers.

DM if you'd like to discuss strategies.

SEC and CFTC unveil new crypto guidance declaring most digital assets are not securities →