In the latest development highlighting Wall Street’s dramatic shift to embracing cryptocurrency, Morgan Stanley has just announced it will offer crypto trading services on its E*trade platform.
“The underlying technology has been proven and blockchain-based infrastructure is obviously here to stay,” Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management, told Bloomberg. “Clients should have access to digitized assets, traditional assets, and cryptocurrencies, all in the same ecosystem that they’re used to.”
The wealth management bank is partnering with crypto and stablecoin infrastructure firm Zerohash to enable customers of the Wall Street giant’s online brokerage platform to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.
Morgan Stanley is among the most aggressive of the big banks embracing crypto after the US government’s stance toward the technology flipped with the election of President Donald Trump. Wealth management accounted for nearly half of Morgan Stanley’s total revenue last year, making it more reliant on the industry than its other big bank peers.
Financial giants are lining up to get into crypto
In a statement, Zerohash CFO Adam Berg said that financial giants “are lining up to dive into crypto”.
“Every financial institution is looking to provide access to the crypto asset class and innovate with this technology at scale…I’ve recently met with multiple large bank CEOs and financial services executives, many of whom said that they are spending more than 50% of their time driving on-chain innovation at their firms.”