Morgan Stanley Investment Management launched two new crypto exchange-traded products on NYSE Arca on July 28: the Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust (MSSE) and the Morgan Stanley Solana Trust (MSOL). Both carry a 0.14% expense ratio and both intend to stake a portion of their holdings, passing the full staking reward through to shareholders.
"MSIM will not retain any portion of the rewards earned by either ETP for itself," the firm said in its announcement .
The products track the CoinDesk Ether Benchmark and CoinDesk Solana Benchmark 4pm New York settlement rates, respectively. Morgan Stanley Investment Management acts as Delegated Sponsor rather than direct custodian, holding assets through third-party custodial agreements in segregated accounts. Neither trust is registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the same structure used by the spot bitcoin and ether ETFs approved in 2024.
“Since introducing our first ETFs in 2023, we’ve built a diversified suite of ETFs and ETPs that now exceed $14 billion in assets under management,” said Ally Wallace, MSIM’s global head of ETFs. “The addition of MSSE and MSOL reflects the natural evolution of our product suite, which seeks to provide simplified access to digital assets through the ETP wrapper.”
Amy Oldenburg, MSIM’s head of digital asset strategy, framed the launch around portfolio construction rather than speculation: “Digital assets are becoming an increasingly important component of diversified investment portfolios.”
The launch follows the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), which debuted earlier this year as the first crypto ETP from a U.S. bank-affiliated asset manager and holds more than $381 million in assets as of July 16. MSSE and MSOL extend that franchise from bitcoin, where Morgan Stanley was already a year behind the first spot approvals, into Ether and Solana, where it is considerably later still.
By the time MSSE and MSOL started trading, Bitwise’s staked Solana ETF (BSOL) already held roughly $418 million and staked its full Solana balance for a 7.1% reward rate, using its own validator infrastructure rather than delegating to an outside operator. Grayscale’s Solana Trust ETF (GSOL) targets full staking too, but at a considerably higher cost: a 0.35% base fee plus a 23% cut of staking rewards. REX-Osprey’s SSK, the first U.S. fund to combine spot Solana exposure with staking, has around $90 million in assets. Morgan Stanley is not creating this category. It is undercutting it on price while adding a brand name that carries weight with wealth managers who would not put client capital into a REX-Osprey or Bitwise product.
That price positioning matters more than usual because of where Ether and Solana actually sit. Ether has fallen more than two-thirds from its August 2025 high near $4,950 and is trading close to $1,900, down roughly a third year to date and underperforming bitcoin’s own decline. Solana has fared worse in percentage terms, trading near $74, down about 74% from its January 2025 peak. A staking yield is a percentage of a shrinking number, and a fund’s expense ratio eats into that yield directly. On assets that have lost most of their dollar value over the past year, the difference between paying 0.14% and paying 0.35% plus a quarter of the reward stream is no longer a rounding error for an allocator sizing a position for the first time.
What’s notable is that the price collapse has not deterred flows into these wrappers. Solana spot ETFs have taken in more than $1.1 billion cumulatively , and by late July had strung together a run of consecutive trading sessions with net inflows even as the token itself sat near multi-quarter lows. That combination, falling spot price alongside rising ETF assets, is usually read as evidence that the buyer base has shifted: from traders chasing momentum to allocators building a structural position through a regulated wrapper, indifferent to short-term price action because the thesis is multi-year. Morgan Stanley’s entry reinforces that reading. A private bank does not launch a staking product to catch a rally; it launches one because its wealth management arm has clients asking for an allocation and needs a vehicle it is comfortable putting in front of them.
The regulatory backdrop has also shifted the calculus for issuers. The SEC has spent this month working through a broader “Regulation Crypto” agenda that includes a proposed generic listing standard for crypto ETFs, under which any asset with six months of regulated futures trading would qualify automatically rather than requiring an asset-specific rule filing. That kind of standardization is what lets an asset manager like Morgan Stanley move from bitcoin to ether to solana in the space of months rather than years, and it is likely to keep drawing new entrants into an already crowded staked-ETP field.
The open question is whether undercutting on fee is enough to take share from Bitwise and REX-Osprey, both of which have a head start and, in BSOL’s case, its own validator setup rather than a delegated one. Fee compression tends to favor incumbents with scale until a large enough distribution advantage arrives to reset the field, and Morgan Stanley’s wealth management channel is exactly that kind of advantage. The next few months of AUM data, not the launch itself, will show whether brand and price beat first-mover validator infrastructure in a market still deciding what a staking ETF is actually worth.
