Morgan Stanley has launched a spot Bitcoin ETF under its own name, pricing the fund at 0.14% a year and making it the cheapest spot Bitcoin ETF on the market. The new fund, MSBT, took in $34 million on its first day of trading and bought 430 BTC.
The debut puts Morgan Stanley in a business it once dismissed outright. In 2017, its analysts published a research note arguing that Bitcoin’s true value could be zero, a line that now sits in sharp contrast with the bank’s decision to distribute a spot Bitcoin ETF under its own name.
The size of the launch helped underscore the shift. ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said MSBT’s first day ranked it in the top 1% of all ETF launches over the past year. The fee also lands below BlackRock’s IBIT, which charges 0.25%, giving Morgan Stanley a cheaper entry point for investors who want direct Bitcoin exposure through a traditional brand.
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The move also follows a deeper change inside the firm. Morgan Stanley’s 16,000 financial advisors have been recommending Bitcoin ETFs since 2024, but until now they were steering clients toward rival products. The bank is now putting its own name on the trade after years of treating the asset as something close to a nonstarter.
That reversal comes as the broader crypto market has begun to stabilize. Bitcoin ETFs posted their first positive monthly inflows of 2026 in March, drawing $1.32 billion after four straight months of outflows, a backdrop that makes a low-fee Bitcoin product more timely than it would have been earlier this year.
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Morgan Stanley is not stopping there. The bank filed for Ethereum and Solana trusts in January 2026 and plans to launch retail crypto trading on E*Trade in the first half of this year, signaling that MSBT may be less a one-off than the opening move in a wider push into digital assets.
