Vanguard Finally Texts Back Crypto After Three Years of "Who Is This?" 🚀

Vanguard has opened a search for its first head of digital assets, a senior role tasked with building a multi-year roadmap covering cryptocurrencies, tokenization, stablecoins, custody, digital wallets and blockchain-enabled settlement. The job posting, requisition 179858, went live on Vanguard's careers portal on July 6 under Vanguard Personal Wealth, with hybrid seats listed in Malvern, Dallas, Scottsdale and Charlotte. The new executive will set the firm's digital asset vision, coordinate execution across product, technology, operations, legal and compliance, advise senior leadership, and represent the company in discussions with regulators, clients and industry groups. The mandate also requires evaluating whether to build capabilities internally, partner with third parties or delay entering specific segments of the market.

The move marks a notable shift for the $10+ trillion asset manager, which blocked spot Bitcoin ETFs from its brokerage platform when they launched in January 2024 and long dismissed crypto as speculative. In August 2024, then-newly appointed CEO Salim Ramji said the company would not launch crypto exchange-traded funds and would not "copy competitors" despite rapid adoption of spot Bitcoin ETFs. The position began to soften in December 2025, when Vanguard started allowing brokerage clients to trade third-party cryptocurrency ETFs and mutual funds, giving more than 50 million brokerage clients access to funds holding Bitcoin ($BTC), Ethereum ($ETH), XRP and Solana ($SOL).

Vanguard was founded in 1975 and manages approximately $12.5 trillion in global assets, according to the company. The asset manager still has no plans to launch a proprietary crypto ETF, and its published guidance favors assets with transparent cash flows, offering crypto exposure only through third-party products, much like gold. Peers including BlackRock, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton have moved further: BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which Ramji helped lead before joining Vanguard, held about $54 billion as of March 31 per an iShares fact sheet. Competition among issuers has driven Bitcoin ETF expense ratios as low as 0.14%, while US spot Bitcoin ETFs held $74.37 billion in net assets as of July 2, with inflows of $221.72 million that day after a 10-day outflow streak; total net assets stood at $77.32 billion as of this writing.

The new role is broader than any single fund launch and is positioned alongside the wider institutional push into tokenized finance. The tokenized real-world asset market has grown to $33.5 billion, including $14.9 billion in tokenized US Treasury products, according to RWA.xyz, with Franklin Templeton managing about $2.5 billion in tokenized assets, BlackRock overseeing roughly $2.3 billion, and WisdomTree's tokenized Treasury fund at more than $700 million. In March, Franklin Templeton partnered with Ondo Finance to offer tokenized versions of its ETFs through crypto wallets and later launched a dedicated cryptocurrency investment division following its acquisition of crypto asset manager 250 Digital, while JPMorgan filed in May to launch a tokenized money market fund for stablecoin issuers and State Street introduced a government money market fund for stablecoin reserves and a tokenized liquidity product the following month, and Fidelity launched a blockchain-based liquidity fund that received its first crypto-native investment last month after Theo allocated $20 million to the product.