- Morgan Stanley today launched a crypto trading pilot on the E*Trade platform – 0.5% fee beats Coinbase, Schwab and Fidelity
- All 8.6 million E*Trade customers will have access to buy BTC, ETH and SOL in one place with their stocks and ETFs later this year
- The head of Morgan Stanley’s wealth management says directly: the goal is to “bite out those who robbed the banks” – i.e. Coinbase and Robinhood
- This is not another ETF. This is a direct purchase of crypto by one of the world’s largest investment banks – a change that could reshape the retail market
For the past decade, Coinbase and Robinhood have built their empires on one advantage: banks couldn’t offer crypto, but they could. This era is coming to an end.
Today, Morgan Stanley – a bank managing USD 1.5 trillion in client assets – launched a pilot of direct trading of Bitcoin, Ether and Solana on the E*Trade platform. Transaction fee: 0.5%. That’s less than Coinbase charges, less than Schwab, and less than Fidelity. Robinhood advertises itself as commission-free, but the spread on each transaction is from 0.35% to 0.95% – which is actually higher than Morgan Stanley.
Jed Finn, the bank’s head of wealth management, told Bloomberg something worth remembering: “This is much more than just buying crypto cheaper. In a sense, our strategy is to take advantage of those who take advantage of the banks.”
“Disintermediating the disintermediators” – the elimination of intermediaries by those who were previously eliminated by the same intermediaries. Financial Ricochet on a global scale.
What exactly is changing
For years, buying Bitcoin for a traditional investor looked like this: you set up an account on Coinbase or a similar platform, verify your identity, transfer money from the bank, wait, buy BTC, maintain a separate wallet. Separate ecosystem, separate application, separate passwords.
Morgan Stanley turns it around 180 degrees. An E*Trade customer will see Bitcoin in the same place as Apple shares, Treasury bonds and the S&P 500 index fund. One dashboard, one verification, one transfer. This is technically handled by Zerohash – a Chicago-based infrastructure company focused on liquidity, custody and settlement – but the customer doesn’t see it. It only sees a “buy BTC” button next to the “buy AAPL” button.
This is a psychological change, not just a technical one. For millions of Americans, crypto is no longer “that weird internet money from a separate app” and is becoming just another item in a broker’s portfolio.
Why is it important for the entire market
Morgan Stanley is not the first bank to move in this direction. Charles Schwab launched spot trading for BTC and ETH in mid-April, charging a 0.75% commission. Fidelity has long had a separate crypto platform with a fee of around 1% per transaction. But Morgan Stanley does it differently: it doesn’t create a separate application, but builds crypto directly into the existing brokerage interface.
Finn says straight that this is just the beginning. The bank submitted applications for ETFs on Ethereum and Solana. It is working on the possibility of converting crypto to ETF without selling assets, and plans to launch tokenized share trading in the second half of the year.
Coinbase collected $3.32 billion in consumer fees in 2025. Robinhood made $901 million from crypto – one-fifth of the company’s total revenue. Now both platforms must answer the question: what is their real competitive advantage if Morgan Stanley offers the same thing cheaper and through an interface that customers have already been using for years?
The Finn summed it up elegantly: “It will be very competitive over the next few years, especially as the protective regulatory trenches dry up.”
What does this mean for you
If you are a Polish investor considering entering BTC, news from the USA may seem distant. But I believe that the signal is global and worth understanding.
First, the massive entry of banks into crypto trading normalizes Bitcoin as an asset class. With Morgan Stanley and Schwab offering BTC on the same interface as S&P 500 stocks, the “it’s just speculation for geeks” argument is losing steam faster than ever.
Secondly, Polish banks and brokerage platforms are watching what their counterparts in the West are doing. PKO, mBank, or Santander will not start BTC trading tomorrow – but competitive pressure from the USA is accelerating the talks that are already taking place in the strategy departments of every large retail bank in Poland.
Third, and this is, in my opinion, the most important: Bitcoin “regulatory moats” – that is, the protection that crypto-native platforms derived from the lack of banking licenses from competitors – are disappearing. Coinbase and Robinhood had to build their businesses despite the lack of trust from traditional institutions. Now traditional institutions come with brand trust, millions of customers and lower fees.
Who will benefit from this? Investors who will get cheaper access to crypto through trusted channels. Who can lose? Crypto-native platforms that built their entire value on the fact that they were the only window to this market.
