Betterment offers four pricey and similar crypto portfolios

What they're saying: Betterment wants to lower the barrier to entry for crypto with a ready-made mix of investments.

• "Crypto as an asset class is here to stay, but picking what to invest in on a coin-by-coin basis is difficult if not impossible," Proudman says, explaining what problem DIY crypto portfolios aim to solve.

Between the lines: Enter the roboadvisor that can simplify investing in crypto the way it has for stocks.

• They also sport low annual fees and come with support like tax-loss harvesting.

Yes, but: A closer examination of the DIY crypto portfolios shows that they are just slight flavor adjustments on the same crypto mix. Whether one wants to bet on the metaverse or DeFi or simply opt out of proof-of-work blockchains in the name of sustainability, with Betterment's portfolios, you end up with similar bags.

• They're pricier too, charging a 1% annually, plus trading fees.

Why it matters: The promise of automated portfolio management — a potential $100 billion-plus in assets by 2026, per one estimate — is so big that firms like Charles Schwab and Vanguard have built their own roboadvisors. And a hunk of that growth could be channeled into crypto as more robos start to pick up coins.

Big picture: Gemini is an important partner in Betterment's crypto portfolios, custodian and venue for the separately managed accounts (SMAs) that Betterment manages on their behalf.

• The Winklevoss brothers' exchange coins listings also determine Betterment's starting list of digital assets to consider for portfolio inclusion. That means a coin not listed on Gemini will not show up in Betterment's crypto portfolios.

How it works: Roboadvisors usually start new customers with a basic questionnaire that gets to how their portfolios should be allocated. A millennial, for example, would have a relatively longer investment time horizon than say someone closer to retirement, so the robo might recommend a bigger slug of stocks relative to bonds.

• Proudman says Betterment's crypto portfolios are not "a forced product" and not part of "core" offerings. That means a Betterment customer who wants to invest in crypto has to opt-in and those portfolios are on a different virtual shelf, segregated from regular portfolios that hold normal things like stocks.

Details: The four crypto portfolios named universe, sustainable, metaverse and decentralized finance each feature around 25 digital assets and purport to deliver a different crypto investment strategy, but are virtually identical to each other.

• In round numbers, each has about a 30% slug of bitcoin, 15% of Ethereum and 3% in dogecoin; the rest is divvied up across a set of tokens with marginal allocation differences between the portfolios.
• The sustainable portfolio is the only one that is meaningfully different. It doesn't have bitcoin, but it also parks around 42% in ether.

Though Proudman first said that the crypto portfolios can be used together — pointing out he owns three of the four — he says most customers will likely pick up just one.

• Betterment isn't claiming that these portfolios will have dramatically different returns over time, he says.
• He also points out that because of their design, the crypto portfolios are more flexible than other core offerings at Betterment, allowing individuals to tweak allocations as needed. (So if you already have a lot of bitcoin, you can dial that down).

Bottom line: It's not cheap, at least not relative to Betterment's usual 0.25% annual fee. For crypto, the robo will charge a 1% annual fee to reflect the "complexity" of crypto management, Proudman says.

• Also, they don't support crypto tax-loss harvesting. But they are working on it.

Be smart: If you parked $10,000 at a roboadvisor for stock portfolios you pay $25 a year, but if you start to touch crypto it's gonna be $100. (That's a big difference)