Morgan Stanley folds bitcoin, ether and solana into E*TRADE as Wall Street push accelerates
Morgan Stanley completes nationwide E*TRADE crypto rollout via Zero Hash, deepening Wall Street's embrace of digital assets alongside pending ETF filings.
Morgan Stanley has completed the nationwide rollout of spot cryptocurrency trading on E*TRADE, its retail brokerage arm, allowing eligible customers across the United States to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana directly through the platform. The launch, confirmed by the bank this week, marks one of the most significant integrations of digital assets into a mainstream Wall Street brokerage to date.
The service is built on infrastructure supplied by Zero Hash, a digital asset settlement and custody specialist that has become a preferred partner for traditional financial institutions entering crypto markets. Customer holdings will sit in linked Zero Hash accounts rather than directly on E*TRADE’s own books, a structure increasingly common as regulated brokers seek to offer crypto exposure without taking on custody risk themselves.
From pilot to national launch
The full rollout follows a pilot programme that began in May, itself the product of plans Morgan Stanley first signalled in 2025. That timeline reflects the cautious, staged approach many large US banks have adopted towards retail crypto access, testing systems and compliance controls before extending services to their broader customer base.
According to reporting from TokenPost, eligible E*TRADE clients will pay a transaction fee of 50 basis points per trade, and the firm has indicated that crypto transfer functionality — allowing customers to move holdings in and out of their linked accounts — is expected later this year. That would bring E*TRADE’s offering closer in line with dedicated crypto exchanges, though still within the guardrails of a regulated brokerage environment.
Part of a wider digital asset strategy
The E*TRADE launch sits alongside Morgan Stanley’s broader push into digital assets. TokenPost reported that the bank has filed amended S-1 registration statements for proposed Ethereum and Solana exchange-traded funds, suggesting the brokerage rollout and the ETF applications form part of a coordinated strategy to capture demand for regulated crypto products across both retail trading and fund structures.
For a bank of Morgan Stanley’s scale, embedding spot crypto trading into an established retail platform used by millions of American investors represents a meaningful validation of digital assets as a mainstream product category, rather than a niche offering confined to specialist exchanges.
Why it matters for European markets
The move underscores a widening gap in pace between US brokerage innovation and Europe’s more cautious, MiCA-governed approach to retail crypto access, where custody, disclosure and marketing rules remain considerably more restrictive. As large US wealth managers normalise crypto trading within existing brokerage relationships, European banks and asset managers face mounting competitive pressure to match that convenience within the bloc’s tighter regulatory perimeter.
It also reinforces the growing reliance of traditional finance on third-party infrastructure providers such as Zero Hash, a dynamic UK and EU regulators are likely to scrutinise closely as they weigh how custody and settlement risk is being distributed between banks and their crypto technology partners.
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