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Financial services giant Morgan Stanley selected Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, a global financial services company, and crypto exchange Coinbase as custodians for its Bitcoin Trust Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.
The custodians will hold all of the fund’s Bitcoin (BTC) in cold storage, or offline methods of storing Bitcoin private keys, with a “portion” of the BTC moving to hot wallets connected to the internet at times for creation and redemption purposes, according to the SEC filing for Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust. The filing said:
“The Bitcoin custodians are chartered as a New York state bank, in the case of BNY, and as a New York state limited liability trust company, in the case of Coinbase custodian. The Bitcoin custodians provide custody and trade execution services for digital assets.”
Morgan Stanley’s S-1 registration form for the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust. Source: SECMorgan Stanley filed SEC applications for spot BTC and SOL (SOL) ETFs in January. Both funds are passive investment vehicles that hold and track the prices of the underlying crypto assets.
The ETF reflects growing institutional adoption of crypto even amid a marketwide downturn that has left BTC down by about 42% from its all-time high of about $126,000. In recent days, BTF ETF flows have flipped, with BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF’s $322 million in inflows logged on Tuesday offsetting outflows from rival funds including Fidelity and Grayscale.
The inflows bring this week’s total to $683.3 million, following $787.3 million in inflows last week — the first positive week after five consecutive weeks of outflows totaling nearly $4 billion.
Related: Morgan Stanley applies for OCC bank charter to custody crypto
ETF will give Morgan Stanley crypto clout, even if it isn’t a “blockbuster” hit
Coming about two years after Bitcoin ETFs first debuted on US markets, the new fund will establish Morgan Stanley’s foothold in crypto and benefit the company even if it does not perform on par with heavyweights like BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, according to Jeff Park, advisor to asset management company BitWise.
On the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call in January, chairman and CEO Ted Pick told analysts that the Wall Street bank was “ well positioned now in the crypto and tokenized asset space,” adding that ”there is a lot for us to do there.”
Launching an ETF cements the company’s footprint in the crypto sector, while also giving it access to top talent from the crypto industry to build out other projects like tokenized real-world asset (RWA) trading, Park said.
Conversely, the launch of a Bitcoin ETF from a major financial services company is also “bullish” for the sector, because it signals there is still a lot of “untapped” interest in digital assets, he added.
“It means the market is much bigger than even crypto professionals anticipated, especially to reach new customers,” he said.
Magazine: Coinbase and Base: Is crypto just becoming traditional finance 2.0?
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