The world’s second-largest asset management giant has finally given in.

Vanguard—the famously ultra-conservative, long-established institution—officially opened up third-party crypto ETF trading to its more than 50 million brokerage accounts starting December 2. Keep in mind, this is a behemoth managing over $11 trillion in assets.

What’s interesting here? Vanguard’s founder, John Bogle, was a champion of long-term value investing—low-cost index funds, safety first. As for highly volatile assets like BTC and ETH? They always scoffed at them.

So this turn is even more shocking than when BlackRock actively embraced crypto. Because this isn’t an active entrance—it’s a reluctant compromise. If they don’t keep up, clients will just head over to Fidelity or Schwab. It’s a matter of survival.

The last line of defense on Wall Street has fallen.

What does this mean for the market? By conservative estimates, even if just 1% of assets from these 50 million accounts are allocated to crypto, that’s a potential buy side worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Of course, actual inflows will be a long-term process—early on, maybe just a few billion or tens of billions will trickle in. But on December 2, IBIT trading volumes spiked, and market sentiment is already heating up.

What’s the deeper impact? When the world’s two largest asset managers start allocating to BTC and ETH ETF products, it’s a seismic shift in perception for traditional clients. You can see Bank of America is now also recommending advisors allocate 1-4% of client portfolios to crypto, in sync with Vanguard.

Crypto assets are moving from the fringes to the mainstream. They’re no longer just speculative targets—they’re becoming “diversification tools,” just like gold ETFs once did.