E*TRADE customers can now buy bitcoin, ether and solana straight from their regular brokerage account. Morgan Stanley, which owns the platform, has closed out a project first announced back in September 2025 — nearly ten months passed between the May pilot and the full rollout on July 16.
The mechanics are straightforward. Trades cost a flat 0.5%, with no hidden markup on the spread. Crypto holdings show up in the same dashboard as stocks and bonds, but custody and settlement run through Zero Hash, a third-party infrastructure provider — so the coins sit in linked Zero Hash accounts rather than on Morgan Stanley's own balance sheet. Moving purchased crypto to an outside wallet isn't possible yet; that feature is promised for later in 2026.
"Our clients' needs are evolving, and they want to invest, trade, bank, and plan for the future all in one place," E*TRADE head Matt Jones said. Chad Turner, who runs Morgan Stanley Wealth Management's platforms, called the rollout another step in the bank's digital-assets push.
For Morgan Stanley, this isn't an isolated move. The bank filed for spot bitcoin and solana ETFs in January, explored asset tokenization in April, and launched a money-market fund built for stablecoin issuers the same month. By mid-July it was sitting on more than 5,700 BTC of its own, roughly 1,000 of which it bought in the two weeks before the E*TRADE launch.
Picking solana as the third asset wasn't an afterthought — it signals that Morgan Stanley treats the top three crypto assets as a legitimate asset class rather than a grudging concession to bitcoin demand. A flat fee with no spread markup is a direct shot at Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood, which have dominated retail crypto brokerage for years. For now, though, the door only swings one way: clients can buy in, but they can't move assets out without a middleman until later this year.
