Morgan Stanley’s MSBT charges 0.14% annually and gives the bank’s 16,000 advisors a bitcoin ETF they can sell in-house.

Morgan Stanley will make history on Wednesday by launching the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT) on NYSE Arca, thus becoming the first major U.S. bank to issue a spot bitcoin ETF under its own name. The fund holds physical bitcoin and will charge an annual management fee of 0.14%, the lowest in the spot bitcoin ETF market.

The pricing undercuts BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which charges 0.25% and currently dominates the category with $70.6 billion in assets and roughly 45% market share. Grayscale’s Bitcoin Mini Trust, previously the cheapest option at 0.15%, also now trails MSBT. For institutional allocators deploying $10 million or more, the 11-basis-point gap translates to $11,000 in annual savings.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

But the fee is only part of the story. Morgan Stanley employs approximately 16,000 wealth management advisors overseeing $9.3 trillion in client assets. Since 2024, those advisors have been allowed to recommend third-party bitcoin ETFs to clients. Now they can recommend one that keeps the management fee in-house and gives the bank direct control over product positioning. Coinbase provides bitcoin custody through cold storage, while BNY Mellon handles cash custody and administration.

MSBT is the first piece of a broader crypto buildout at the bank. In January, Morgan Stanley filed S-1 registrations for both an Ethereum trust and a Solana trust. In February, it applied to the OCC for a National Trust Bank Charter for a proposed entity called Morgan Stanley Digital Trust National Association, covering digital asset custody, fiduciary staking, and token transfers. The bank also plans to launch retail crypto trading on E-Trade in the first half of 2026.

The launch lands in a market that has absorbed $70 billion in net inflows across spot bitcoin ETFs since their January 2024 debut. Whether a bank-branded product can peel assets away from BlackRock’s dominant fund will test how much the wealth management channel values keeping fees and relationships under one roof.