Just a week after Amy Oldenburg, Morgan Stanley’s head of digital assets, spent the better part of an hour making a case for bitcoin that few clients have heard in full (a gap she says is the industry’s most urgent problem),the bank announces the launch of crypto trading on E*Trade, charging 50bps in a pilot that undercuts rivals like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Charles Schwab.
CoinDesk reportsthat Morgan Stanley’s Head of Wealth Management, Jed Finn, said the initiative goes beyond offering cheaper crypto trading and isaimed at “disintermediating the disintermediators,”framing it as a broader structural shift in how clients access digital assets.
The investment banking giant plans to roll the service out to all 8.6 million ETrade customers later this year.
The latest offering builds on a series of crypto-related moves in recent months, including the launch of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, with planned products tied to ether and solana.
Morgan Stanley has also advanced efforts on the infrastructure side, applying for a national trust bank charter that would enable it to directly custody digital assets.
Sources toldBloombergthat thebank is also mulling services that enable conversation of crypto holdings into exchange-traded products without selling and is preparing for potential tokenized equity trading later this year.
These moves are set to amplify competition in a market where Coinbase generated $3.32 billion in consumer transaction revenue in 2025, while Robinhood reported nearly $1 billion in crypto-related revenue.
But,as Bitcoin Magazine reports,the education problem runs deep, according to Oldenburg.
Many investors still associate bitcoin with its early history of use by bad actors, and struggle to see past that frame when weighing an allocation.
Oldenburg said that when clients ask about yield or structured exposure, her team tries to be direct: “you can present it as a yield, but the underlying asset is bitcoin.” That clarity, she said, is still missing from most conversations in the market, and there is “so much more work to do.”
Source: ZeroHedge News
