🔥 E*TRADE launches crypto spot trading, the on-chain financial starting line for Wall Street

E*TRADE, a unit of Morgan Stanley, today announced support for spot trading of BTC/ETH/SOL, with a fee of 50 basis points. This is the first time a mainstream Wall Street retail brokerage has put crypto assets directly into the view of a traditional investment portfolio—users can see stocks, ETFs, and Bitcoin in the same interface.
The underlying infrastructure is Zero Hash, a compliant crypto custody provider. Morgan Stanley did not build its own wallets and did not run proprietary market making; instead, it outsourced the crypto layer to specialized services. This “light-asset integration” approach is more aligned with the compliance cadence of traditional financial institutions than Coinbase opening an account directly.
The signal is clear: when institutions managing tens of billions of dollars of assets are willing to open the crypto gate for retail customers, the liquidity entry point of on-chain finance is shifting from exchanges toward traditional brokerages. E*TRADE’s 5 million active users may be more incrementally meaningful than the addition of users by any native crypto exchange.
The downside risks are also obvious: the 50-basis-point fee is far higher than the 0.1%-level range of major exchanges, and only three assets are currently supported. If users find the costs too high or the selection too limited, capital may only stay briefly. Also, Zero Hash’s custody security has not yet faced large-scale retail testing.
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