Morgan Stanley is bringing crypto to Main Street—starting with E-Trade customers in 2026.
Summary
- Morgan Stanley plans to let retail investors trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other top tokens via its E-Trade platform, leveraging a new partnership with crypto startup Zerohash.
- The move marks another step in Morgan Stanley’s push into digital assets, complementing its wealth management business—which generated nearly half of the bank’s 2024 revenue.
- The Wall Street firm looks to compete with Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and other retail trading platforms.
The New York-based bank will launch the crypto trading service via discount brokerage platform E-Trade in a tie-up with digital assets platform Zerohash.
Reuters reported that the upcoming launch of crypto trading by Morgan Stanley follows a key partnership with crypto startup Zerohash. It also follows Morgan Stanley’s acquisition of E-Trade for $13 billion in 2020, one of the many steps the bank has taken to increase its footprint in the digital assets space. The bank’s plans to offer crypto trading via E-Trade first surfaced in May this year.
Bitcoin, Ethereum trading on E-Trade
When the crypto trading service, targeted for retail customers rolls out in the coming year, E-Trade will allow customers to buy the top cryptocurrencies Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) among others, the bank said.
Morgan Stanley’s crypto trading foray adds to its increased embrace of the ecosystem, which per its earnings results, is a major component in the quest to bolster its wealth management offering.
According to details, almost half of the Wall Street giant’s revenue in 2024 was from wealth management. The digital assets market, increasingly attractive to banks amid the crypto-friendly regulatory landscape in the United States, is thus an important market for Morgan Stanley.
E-Trade’s offering in partnership with Zerohash will see the bank take a step towards eating into the market where players such as Robinhood and Charles Schwab are active.
The announcement of the Zerohash tie-up comes on the same day the crypto platform announced it hit unicorn status amid a $104 million raise in a series D-2 funding round. Interactive Brokers led the funding round, with backing from Morgan Stanley and SoFi among other venture capital firms and investors.
Zerohash will use the capital injection to expand its product, grow its team and deploy innovative solutions to problems impacting the financial markets.