According to Fixygen, the U.S. bank Morgan Stanley has launched a pilot cryptocurrency trading service on its E*Trade platform, Bloomberg reports.
Full access to the service will be available later this year. The E*Trade platform has 8.6 million customers.
The new service features lower fees—0.5% of the dollar value of the transaction. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., Coinbase, charges 0.6%, the popular platform Robinhood charges 0.95%, and Charles Schwab charges 0.75%.
Morgan Stanley is developing cryptocurrency products across various business lines, aiming to integrate traditional finance with decentralized finance.
“This is much more than just trading cryptocurrency with lower fees,” Jed Finn, head of the wealth management segment for high-net-worth individuals, told Bloomberg. “In a sense, this strategy eliminates the middlemen who eliminate middlemen.”
Until recently, bank clients had to turn to other players for cryptocurrency products.
Morgan Stanley is also working to enable clients to convert crypto assets into exchange-traded fund shares without having to sell them first, according to Bloomberg sources. Additionally, in the second half of the year, the bank plans to introduce the ability to trade tokenized stocks for institutional clients.
In April, Morgan Stanley became the first Wall Street bank to launch a Bitcoin ETF, and in February, it applied for a license to provide custody services for digital assets.
