TL;DR
- Morgan Stanley charges fifty basis points undercutting Coinbase and Robinhood significantly.
- Eight point six million E*Trade clients gain cryptocurrency access this year.
- Trump’s regulatory shift enables traditional banks to expand into digital assets.
Morgan Stanley has launched cryptocurrency trading operations on its ETrade platform, positioning itself as a direct competitor to the nation’s largest exchanges. The Wall Street bank charges 50 basis points on the dollar value of each transaction, undercutting Coinbase, Robinhood Markets, and Charles Schwab. The program currently operates in pilot phase, but all 8.6 million ETrade clients will gain access before year-end.
This launch represents a crucial strategic pivot for Morgan Stanley. After years of intense regulatory scrutiny that kept federally regulated banks away from the crypto sector, recent political shifts have opened new opportunities. The Trump administration pledged to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” and that commitment has accelerated plans Morgan Stanley had been developing for years.
Jed Finn, the bank’s head of wealth management, explained the philosophy behind the strategy: “This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate. In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators.” This statement captures the real intention: displacing specialized exchanges like Coinbase by redirecting clients toward a traditional banking platform with established infrastructure.
Competitive Pressure and Price as Weapon
The numbers reveal the magnitude of the challenge. Robinhood charges 95 basis points on crypto operations, while Coinbase starts at 60 basis points. Charles Schwab set its fee at 75 basis points. Morgan Stanley, at 50 basis points, offers the lowest price currently available in the market—a calculated move to attract clients from competitors.
This price aggression does not exist in isolation. Morgan Stanley has executed a multifaceted deployment across the digital sector over recent months. The bank debuted its own Bitcoin exchange-traded fund recently, becoming the first Wall Street bank to launch a crypto ETF, and it did so with the lowest fee in its category. It already has Ether and Solana funds in preparation. In February, it filed for a national trust bank charter, which would allow it to custody digital assets directly.
Executives are also preparing an offering that will let clients convert cryptocurrencies into shares of exchange-traded products without selling their assets first. On the institutional side, Morgan Stanley plans to add the ability to trade tokenized equities in the second half of this year.
Robinhood, which began offering crypto trading in 2018, generated 901 million dollars in crypto transaction-based revenue during the last year—representing 20 percent of its annual net revenue. Yet that figure pales against Coinbase’s haul. Coinbase pulled in 3.32 billion dollars in consumer transaction revenue in 2025, with Bitcoin and Ether transactions accounting for 45 percent of total trading volume.
Coinbase survived the industry upheaval of recent years, including the collapse of rival FTX, to become the largest crypto exchange in the US. Now its roster of competitors has expanded to include traditional banks and other financial firms previously unable to operate significantly in the space. Regulatory barriers that once protected specialized exchanges have eroded rapidly.
The competitive intensity will only deepen in coming years. Morgan Stanley’s executives acknowledge this reality plainly. As Finn stated, “It’s going to be very competitive in the next couple of years, particularly given the regulatory moats are drying up.” Traditional finance now possesses both the scale and the capital to challenge the dominance of crypto-native platforms. The question no longer centers on whether banks will compete in crypto, but rather how quickly they will consolidate market share from their specialized rivals.
