Morgan Stanley listed spot Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) exchange-traded funds on Tuesday, each charging 0.14% and returning 95% of staking rewards to shareholders.
Key Points:
- The Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust and Morgan Stanley Solana Trust began trading on NYSE Arca under the tickers MSSE and MSOL.
- A 0.14% sponsor fee makes both the cheapest products in their categories, undercutting Grayscale and Franklin Templeton.
- The Ethereum fund will stake up to 80% of its holdings, while the Solana fund plans to stake all of its tokens.
Ethereum And Solana ETFs Open On NYSE Arca
The two grantor trusts began trading on NYSE Arca under the tickers MSSE and MSOL. Both launched with expense ratios of 14 basis points, and each holds the underlying token directly rather than a derivative contract. Performance tracks the CoinDesk Ether and Solana benchmark rates, which aggregate volume across major spot exchanges and settle at 4 p.m. in New York each trading day.
That price undercuts Grayscale's Mini Ethereum Trust at 0.15% and Franklin Templeton's Solana product at 0.19%, the previous cost leaders in their respective markets.
BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust, the biggest fund in the category, charges 0.25%, nearly double what Morgan Stanley now charges.
Staking sets the pair apart. MSSE will stake between 50% and 80% of its Ether, chasing a base network rate near 1.7%, while MSOL plans to stake all of its SOL at roughly 3.4%. Shareholders collect 95% of those rewards, and the remaining 5% covers validator work by Figment, Galaxy Blockchain Infrastructure and Coinbase Canada.
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Balchunas Confirms Cheapest Crypto ETF Launch
Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas confirmed the debut and called the two funds the cheapest ever listed in their categories.
Each opened with 50,000 shares outstanding and a little over $1 million in assets, roughly six months after Morgan Stanley registered the products in January and began revising the filings.
Ally Wallace, global head of ETFs at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, said the firm's exchange-traded lineup now holds more than $14 billion. Amy Oldenburg, who runs digital asset strategy at the bank, said clients increasingly treat digital assets as a standard piece of a diversified portfolio. Neither executive offered a public asset target for the two new funds.
The quieter advantage is distribution and scale. Morgan Stanley employs roughly 16,000 wealth advisers overseeing more than $9 trillion in client assets, and it owns E*TRADE, a retail brokerage that most rival issuers can only rent access to.
Bitcoin Trust Set The Morgan Stanley Template
Morgan Stanley tested this formula on Apr. 8, when the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin (BTC) Trust began trading as the first spot crypto fund from a major U.S. bank.
That product carried the same 0.14% fee and pulled in more than $33 million on its opening day. By Jul. 24 it had notched over $391 million in assets, even as Bitcoin traded near $64,000 and competing funds recorded steady outflows.
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