Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, as well as Chief Information Officer of Global Risk Technologies, shares her insights on Crypto and its place in an adviser’s portfolio.
Crypto has stopped being a niche conversation for advisers. Almost a third of advisers allocated to crypto in client accounts in 2025, up from 22% the year before and 94% reported fielding crypto-related questions from clients. Whatever an adviser’s personal view on digital assets, the conversation is no longer optional.
What that conversation tends to get wrong is the framing. The crypto industry has a habit of presenting every question as a binary choice. Are you for decentralisation or against it? Do you trust the blockchain or the bank? Pro-crypto or pro-regulation? That framing does a disservice to advisers trying to have a serious conversation with clients, because it is the wrong question entirely.
I have spent years working with some of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and the question I hear most often from people outside the industry is some version of this: how can a system designed to operate without central authority also need regulation? To many, that sounds like a contradiction. It is not. It reflects how every mature financial system actually works and it is the distinction advisers need to draw clearly for clients allocating to digital assets today.
Two separate questions, not one
There are two entirely separate things being conflated in almost every debate about crypto regulation: how money moves and how consumers are protected when something goes wrong. Those are not the same question and they do not require the same answer. The blockchain can be transparent, decentralised and peer-to-peer. All of that is entirely compatible with having centralised, enforceable standards for what happens when a client is scammed, disputes a charge, or needs recourse after a failed transaction.
No one, not even the most committed crypto maximalist, genuinely believes clients should be left without protection if they are defrauded. The moment someone says, “I believe in decentralisation except when my client gets scammed,” they have already conceded the point. Consumer protection requires governance and it always has.
Why regulation should reassure advisers
The GENIUS Act, signed into US law in July 2025 as the country’s first major federal crypto legislation, understood this distinction clearly. It did not attempt to centralise how stablecoins are issued or traded. Instead, it established consumer protection standards around reserve requirements, redemption rights and insolvency protections, because functioning markets require a foundation of trust that markets alone cannot self-generate.
The EU’s MiCA framework arrived at the same conclusion through a different route, as did the FCA’s evolving cryptoasset regulatory framework in the UK. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are not trying to kill crypto. They are building the foundation that allows advisers to recommend it with greater confidence and that clients deserve when allocating real wealth to digital assets.
This matters commercially as well as philosophically. Stablecoin transaction volumes reached record highs in 2024, reflecting genuine adoption at scale. But adoption and trust are not the same thing. Pew Research Center found that 75% of Americans still have little or no confidence that crypto exchanges can safeguard their funds. Advisers sit at exactly that fault line: clients are allocating more, asking more questions and trusting the underlying infrastructure less. That gap is where advisers add real value and where the regulatory direction should be seen as an ally rather than a threat.
Why crypto keeps returning to card rails
Look at what is happening with crypto card products. Revolut’s recent launch of its first physical crypto card, joining Coinbase, Crypto.com and Binance in routing crypto spending through Visa and Mastercard rails, is instructive. It is a smart product decision and genuinely useful for consumers, but it also reveals something important: every major attempt to make crypto spendable in everyday life ultimately relies on card infrastructure, because card networks provide a standardised, enforceable consumer protection framework that the crypto ecosystem has not yet built for itself at scale.
Clients rely on dispute rights whether they consciously think about them or not. When crypto platforms attach themselves to card rails, they are borrowing that trust. The same principle applies to how clients should think about the platforms and custodians they use to hold digital assets within an advised portfolio.
Trust infrastructure will define the next phase of crypto
Across the crypto sector, platforms are increasingly investing in stronger dispute visibility, operational intelligence and consumer protection infrastructure as adoption grows and regulatory expectations evolve. AI and machine learning are playing a growing role in helping firms identify dispute patterns earlier and strengthen how post-transaction issues are resolved. The platforms that invest now are likely to build the strongest long-term advantages in client trust and for advisers recommending an allocation, that infrastructure is increasingly part of the due diligence question, not an afterthought.
Decentralisation and consumer protection are not opposites. The sooner the industry and the advisers navigating it on behalf of clients, stop treating them as if they are, the sooner crypto can be allocated with the same confidence as any other asset class.
About Monica Eaton
Monica Eaton is the Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, as well as Chief Information Officer of Global Risk Technologies. Monica has worked tirelessly to educate merchants and financial institutions about hidden threats in the rapidly changing payment fraud landscape.
Leading Chargebacks911, was founded in Tampa Bay, Florida, expanding internationally also to become Europe’s first chargeback remediation specialist to tackle the chargeback fraud problem. In ten years, Chargebacks911 has successfully protected more than 10 billion online transactions and has recovered over $1 billion in chargeback fraud.
Monica is a passionate diversity advocate committed to developing and sharing innovative solutions that empower the global fintech space. She has earned numerous awards, distinctions and special recognitions, including the Retail Systems Awards’ Outstanding Individual Achievement Award, Fintech Futures PayTech Awards’ 2025 Woman in Payment Award, the Women in Governance, Risk and Compliance Awards’ 2025 CEO of the Year, and was named to American Banker’s 2024 Most Influential Women in Fintech.
