The actions come after the Wall Street bank applied to the SEC for Bitcoin, Solana, and Ethereum funds, and BTC exchange-traded fund flows turned positive.
Morgan Stanley, a big financial services business, chose Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, a worldwide financial services firm, and Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, to be the custodians for its Bitcoin Trust Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.
ETF flows turn positive after weeks of outflows
According to the SEC filing for the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust, the custodians will keep all of the fund’s Bitcoin (BTC $73,265) in cold storage, which means offline ways of storing Bitcoin private keys.
Hot wallets, occasionally connected to the internet for creation and redemption, will receive a “portion” of the BTC. The document added, The Bitcoin custodians are chartered as a New York state bank (BNY) and as a New York state limited liability trust company (Coinbase custodian).
Morgan Stanley asked the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) for spot BTC (Bitcoin) and SOL (Solana) ETFs (exchange-traded funds) priced at $91.74 in January. Both funds are passive investments that keep track of the prices of the crypto assets they hold.
The ETF shows that more and more institutions are using crypto, even if the market as a whole is going down and BTC is down about 42% from its all-time high of roughly $126,000. BTF ETF flows have changed recently. On Tuesday, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF had $322 million in inflows, which made up for outflows from other funds including Fidelity and Greyscale.
This week’s total is now $683.3 million, up from $787.3 million last week. This is the first week of positive inflows, after five weeks of outflows that totalled almost $4 billion.
Morgan Stanley will have more power in the crypto world thanks to ETF, even if it isn’t a “blockbuster” hit.
Source: SEC
Strategic positioning in digital assets
Jeff Park, an advisor to the asset management company BitWise, says that the new fund will help Morgan Stanley get into the crypto market and make money, even if it doesn’t do as well as big players like BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust. This is about two years after Bitcoin ETFs first appeared on US markets.
Chairman and CEO Ted Pick told investors during the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call in January that the Wall Street bank was “well positioned now in the crypto and tokenised asset space,” adding that “there is a lot for us to do there.”
Park stated that launching an ETF will help the company establish itself in the crypto space and give it access to top talent from the industry to work on other projects, such as trading tokenised real-world assets (RWA).
On the other hand, a big financial services business launching a Bitcoin ETF is also “bullish” for the industry since it shows that there is still a lot of “untapped” demand in digital assets.