Morgan Stanley Considers Offering Bitcoin ETF Products To Clients, Signaling Opening Of Huge Institutional Market, CoinDesk Says

BySteven Walgenbach

Updated: 29 February 2024

Disclosure

Don’t invest unless prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, you shouldn’t expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

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Morgan Stanley is considering offering spot Bitcoin ETF (exchange-traded fund) investment products to investors via its massive brokerage platform, CoinDesk reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street giant has been mulling whether to add a spot Bitcoin ETF since the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the investment vehicles at the beginning of the year, the story said, citing one of the sources. The matter is undergoing due diligence, it added, citing two sources.

Wall Street Banks Offering Bitcoin ETF Products Opens Huge New Market

Billions of dollars have already poured into the newly-launched spot Bitcoin ETFs since their launch. But if large Wall Street investment platforms such as those run by Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo offer their huge client bases the products, it will open the door to a huge new institutional client base.

Morgan Stanley‘s wealth management unit boasts a whopping $150 billion in assets under management and it is among the largest broker-dealer platforms in the US. It is not yet clear which of the 10 newly-launched ETFs Morgan Stanley might choose to offer to its clients.

The Wall Street titan previously labeled the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. as a “potential paradigm shift” in the global perception towards digital currencies. Its head of digital asset markets, Andrew Peel, said digital assets will influence the future of international trade and finance, and potentially reshape the global economic and financial landscape.

RIDIC: the New Nine doubled their volume record (set Monday) with just about $6b traded.. $IBIT led w $3.3b of it, Fidelity did $1.4b (both double their prev records). The total number of trades was double too, over half a million individual trades bt them. $IBIT alone > $QQQ. pic.twitter.com/ZzB5PWXA4f

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) February 28, 2024

This is not the first time Morgan Stanley is contemplating adding a Bitcoin investment product to its suite of offerings. During its first quarter earnings call in April 2021, the company confirmed that it was opening up exposure to BTC for its clients through external crypto funds. This made Morgan Stanley the first major U.S. bank to offer its wealthy clients access to Bitcoin investment opportunities.