In 2020 the UK's Financial Conduct Authority banned the sale of crypto-linked exchange-traded products to retail investors, calling them too risky and too hard to value. That ban defined the British market for years. It is now effectively over.
What changed
The FCA lifted the retail restriction on qualifying crypto exchange-traded notes (ETNs) from October 2025, on the condition that the products are listed on the FCA's official list and traded on a recognised UK exchange. The regulator framed it explicitly as a competitiveness measure — a signal that Britain did not want to fall behind the US and EU on regulated crypto access.
Platforms moved at different speeds. The symbolic moment came this week: Hargreaves Lansdown, which serves around two million clients and oversees more than £170 billion, began offering nine crypto ETNs from issuers including iShares, WisdomTree, 21Shares, CoinShares and Bitwise. HL was the largest platform still refusing — and had publicly called Bitcoin "not an asset class" as recently as last year.
The details that matter
These are notes that track the price of Bitcoin or Ether. The investor never holds a coin, a wallet or a private key — it behaves like any other line item in a brokerage account. On HL they can sit in a general investing account or, notably, a SIPP (a self-invested personal pension) — but not in a tax-free ISA. Ongoing charges run up to about 0.35% a year.
Being pension-eligible is the quietly significant part. It moves crypto exposure from "speculative side account" toward "one small sleeve of a long-term retirement portfolio," which is a very different kind of demand.
Why it matters
This is the same pattern showing up in market after market: a regulator reframes crypto access as a competitiveness question, the big mainstream distributors follow, and buying exposure stops requiring any crypto-specific knowledge. It does not make the asset less volatile. It does mean the pool of people who can hold it, through accounts they already have, keeps getting larger — and that a long-time skeptic changing its mind is now a business decision, not a statement of belief.
This article is general commentary for information only and is not investment advice.
