Morgan Stanley debuts crypto trading, undercuts rivals on price

Morgan Stanley is rolling out cryptocurrency trading on its E-Trade platform with a dig at rivals: cheaper pricing.

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The Wall Street bank is charging clients 50 basis points on the dollar value of each crypto transaction — undercutting Coinbase, the biggest crypto exchange in the U.S., as well as Robinhood and Charles Schwab. The offering is in pilot now, with all of E-Trade’s 8.6 million clients set to gain access later this year.

The launch is Morgan Stanley’s latest volley in what executives describe as a road map to soak up share in an asset class that was, until recently, all but off limits for banks. The firm is betting traditional finance and so-called decentralized finance, or “defi,” will converge, and is building out crypto-related offerings across its business lines to lure customers who previously had to go elsewhere. 

“This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate,” Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management, said in an interview. “In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators.”

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After years of intense regulatory scrutiny, President Donald Trump’s second term ushered in a new era for the digital asset industry. During his campaign, he vowed to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” That extended to banks, which had been subject to regulatory measures discouraging them from doing much in the space up until recently.

Inside Morgan Stanley, discussions on how to expand in crypto have ebbed and flowed for years. Efforts to stand up various offerings at times collided with price crashes that sapped client interest, as well as regulatory pushback. 

After Trump won the 2024 election, talks on how to expand in the space gained momentum once more. Executives decided to offer spot trading on E-Trade and set out making plans to do so last year. In September, Morgan Stanley said it would partner with crypto infrastructure provider Zerohash to let clients trade popular coins, beginning with bitcoin, ether and solana.

Cheaper pricing

Morgan Stanley’s 50-basis-point pricing is about half of Robinhood’s, which starts at 95 basis points. Coinbase’s fees start at 60 basis points, and Schwab said last month it will charge 75 basis points.

Spot trading on E-Trade is just one of the inroads Morgan Stanley has made into the crypto space over the last year or so. It debuted a bitcoin exchange-traded fund last month — the first Wall Street bank to do so — and made it the cheapest fund in the category. It also has ether and solana ETFs on the way, and in February it applied for a national trust bank charter to allow Morgan Stanley to custody digital assets as well.

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Executives are readying an offering for clients to convert crypto into shares of exchange-traded products without having to sell the assets first, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information. On the institutional side, Morgan Stanley plans to add the ability to trade tokenized equities in the second half of this year.

After the financial crisis, executives reshaped Morgan Stanley into a wealth management powerhouse less reliant on the traditional Wall Street businesses of trading and investment banking. Its $13 billion purchase of E-Trade in 2020 was a major push into the retail market, which came with a new suite of rivals in the digital brokerage space. 

One of them, Robinhood, was a financial technology startup able to move faster into crypto than federally regulated banks. It began offering crypto trading in 2018, and last year made $901 million in crypto transaction-based revenue — 20% of its annual net revenue.

And that was just a fraction of Coinbase’s haul: that firm pulled in $3.32 billion in consumer transaction revenue in 2025. Bitcoin and ether transactions made up 45% of Coinbase’s total trading volume last year.

Coinbase survived industry upheaval a few years ago, including the collapse of rival FTX, to become the biggest crypto exchange in the U.S. Now its roster of competitors has swelled to include traditional banks and other financial firms previously unable to do much in the space.

“It’s going to be a very competitive in the next couple of years, particularly given the regulatory moats are drying up,” Finn said.