[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Global investment bank Morgan Stanley has started direct cryptocurrency trading on its online brokerage platform E*Trade.

BeInCrypto, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Tuesday that Morgan Stanley is applying a 50-basis-point fee per trade, or 0.5 percent, and is seeking to attract retail investors at lower costs than Coinbase, Robinhood and Charles Schwab.

The service is currently in a pilot phase for a small number of users. Bloomberg reported that an expansion to all 8.6 million E*Trade customers is expected in late 2026. The assets available for trading in the pilot are three tokens: bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and solana (SOL).

Fee competitiveness is seen as central to the launch. Charles Schwab charges 75 basis points for spot bitcoin and ether trading that it started recently. Coinbase’s retail fees can exceed 0.5 percent depending on user tier and payment method. Robinhood promotes zero fees, but spreads are typically in the range of 35 to 95 basis points per trade. Fidelity’s separate crypto product charges about 1 percent per trade.

Morgan Stanley linked its trading infrastructure to an external provider. Chicago-based infrastructure firm Zerohash is responsible for custody, liquidity and settlement. Morgan Stanley holds an equity stake in the company. Mastercard has also moved to acquire Zerohash, and the deal size is said to be about $2 billion.

The launch also ties in with Morgan Stanley’s crypto expansion strategy. Weeks before the E*Trade launch, it introduced a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund called MSBT. The product was listed in April and has a total expense ratio of 0.14 percent, the lowest level in the U.S. market. Morgan Stanley has also filed separately for spot ether and solana ETFs. The assets available in the pilot, bitcoin, ether and solana, also match the assets it has filed for in the ETFs.

It also has an advantage in distribution. E*Trade provides Morgan Stanley with customer access that crypto exchanges would find difficult to match. About 16,000 Morgan Stanley internal advisers manage about $9.3 trillion in client assets, providing many routes to connect funds to the new trading service. The industry views E*Trade, given this point, as closer to a broad expansion of sales channels than a simple addition of a new feature.

Its pricing strategy is also aggressive. Morgan Stanley appears to have chosen to sacrifice some profitability to secure a share of the retail crypto market before rival banks respond in earnest. Such pricing is typically read as a signal that it is willing to accept margin compression. How much Coinbase and Robinhood adjust effective fees is expected to affect the pilot’s impact on the industry’s pricing structure.

Two points will be closely watched. They are the pace at which E*Trade’s pilot expands to all customers and how existing crypto trading platforms adjust fee and spread policies. As Morgan Stanley expands by bundling ETFs and brokerage trading around the same asset class, the push by traditional financial firms into the retail crypto market is raising the possibility of accelerating further.