BlackRock’s top-performing exchange-traded fund (ETF) is now facing its strongest competition yet, as Morgan Stanley officially launches a lower-cost rival backed by direct access to trillions in client assets on the NYSE Arca stock exchange.
Morgan Stanley’s MSBT Debuts
The debut of the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT) on April 8 was confirmed by the company.
“With MSBT, we’re extending our product offering to meet growing client interest in digital assets,” said Ally Wallace, Global Head of ETF Strategy at Morgan Stanley, in a statement.
The newly launched ETF instantly positions itself as a strong competitor, offering lower costs than existing Bitcoin funds. Morgan Stanley noted that “MSBT’s unitary delegated sponsor fee is 0.14%, currently the lowest among Bitcoin ETP sponsor fees at the time of launch.”
The fee undercuts Grayscale Investments’s Bitcoin Mini Trust, previously the low-cost leader at 0.15%, and comes in 11 basis points below BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) at 0.25%. Despite the pricing pressure, BlackRock’s ETF remains the dominant player, with roughly $60 billion in assets under management.



 First Bank Introducing Bitcoin ETF
Morgan Stanley has become the first major bank to launch a Bitcoin ETF—something that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
“This bank happens to have 16k advisors managing $6T in assets. They are the ultimate gatekeepers of rich boomer money,” Bloomberg’s senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas previously said.
That said, the bank can leverage its extensive wealth-management network, in which advisors can adjust client allocations with a single trade. In practice, this could channel fresh demand toward MSBT instead of established funds like IBIT.
Midway through the trading day, MSBT has already reached about $27 million in volume, surpassing expectations and putting it on track to clear the $30 million mark, with projections potentially rising toward $50 million. Balchunas, who shared the update, noted that this level of activity places the ETF among the top tier of recent launches, with only a few in the past year—such as Bitwise’s Solana Staking ETF (BSOL), and the Canary XRP ETF (XRPC), each near the $60 million range—achieving comparable first-day volumes.
Morgan Stanley’s MSBT launch adds to the Wall Street giant’s increasingly aggressive push into the crypto market this year. As ZyCrypto reported, Morgan Stanley also filed to list ETFs tied to staked Ether and Solana during the first week of January.
The bank also applied for a national trust banking charter in February, a move that would allow it to custody crypto assets, facilitate client trades and swaps, and provide staking services.
