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A pilot program offering crypto trades at 50 basis points per transaction has been quietly rolled out by Morgan Stanley on E*Trade, with pricing designed to beat out Coinbase, Robinhood, and Charles Schwab, Bloomberg reported. The service is currently in a pilot phase, with all 8.6 million E*Trade customers set to gain access later this year.
At 95 basis points, Robinhood's entry-level rate is nearly double Morgan Stanley's, while Coinbase opens at 60 basis points and Schwab recently announced it would set its rate at 75 basis points, per Bloomberg.
Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley's head of wealth management, framed the move as something broader than a pricing play. "This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate," Finn told Bloomberg. "In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators."
The crypto trading rollout is one piece of a wider push into digital assets at Morgan Stanley. The bank debuted a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund last month — the first Wall Street bank to do so — and has Ether and Solana ETFs in development. In February, it applied for a national trust bank charter that would allow it to custody digital assets, according to Bloomberg. The bank is also preparing a service that would let clients convert crypto holdings into exchange-traded products without first selling the assets, and plans to add tokenized equity trading on the institutional side in the second half of this year.
The E*Trade spot trading service relies on an arrangement with Zerohash, a crypto infrastructure provider, and covers Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana at launch, according to Bloomberg.
The firm is entering a market with established and sizable players. Among the incumbents Morgan Stanley is challenging, Coinbase took in $3.32 billion from consumer transactions in 2025, and crypto activity brought Robinhood $901 million last year, a share equal to one-fifth of its total annual net revenue. "It's going to be very competitive in the next couple of years, particularly given the regulatory moats are drying up," Finn told Bloomberg.
The expansion comes as Morgan Stanley has been posting record financial results, with total revenue rising 16% to $20.58 billion in the first quarter of 2026 and wealth management revenue climbing to a record $8.52 billion. When Morgan Stanley paid $13 billion for E*Trade in 2020, the deal thrust it into a retail landscape already shaped by digital-first competitors — Robinhood among them — that had spent years building out crypto features that traditional banks were effectively barred from offering.