Charles Schwab manages $12.22 trillion in client assets and still does not let those clients buy a single Bitcoin directly. That changes in the first half of 2026.

CEO Rick Wurster confirmed spot BTC and ETH trading at the Reuters Next conference back in December. The rollout is phased, starting with internal employee testing, then a limited client pilot, then full availability across all 38.9 million active brokerage accounts.

This is not an ETF. Not a futures product. Not indirect exposure through a crypto-related stock. Schwab is building a dedicated Schwab Crypto account through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, meaning clients will hold actual Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The contrast with Fidelity is worth sitting with. Fidelity has offered direct spot trading of BTC, ETH, Litecoin, and Solana to retail clients for years. Schwab, with a larger client base and more total assets under management, spent that entire period offering nothing but ETFs and crypto-adjacent equities.

Now they are catching up, and the scale of what catching up means here is hard to ignore. Even if a fraction of those 38.9 million accounts allocate anything to spot crypto, the demand signal hitting the market would be unlike anything retail traders have seen from a single brokerage move.

Fidelity opened the door. Schwab is about to walk through it with a much larger crowd behind them.

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