Morgan Stanley Prepares To Offer Crypto Trading on E*Trade Via Zerohash Partnership 

Wall Street banking giant Morgan Stanley has confirmed plans to offer crypto trading on its E*Trade online brokerage platform through a team-up with digital asset infrastructure provider Zerohash. E*Trade users will be able to trade cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Partnership With Zerohash Will Help Morgan Stanley Offer Crypto Trading

The New York-based banking giant Morgan Stanley is preparing to expand its other digital asset services by offering crypto trading. Morgan Stanley will offer crypto trading on E*Trade through a partnership with Zerohash. 

The bank will rely on the specialized technology from Zerohash to offer crypto trading to its users. Zerohash also recently raised $104 million in a Series D funding round with backing from Morgan Stanley. The partnership with Zerohash will make it easy for the millions of existing E*Trade customers to access cryptocurrency trading through their brokerage accounts directly. 

Because Morgan Stanley will offer crypto trading through an established crypto asset infrastructure provider, E*Trade users will be able to add digital assets to their portfolios without opening separate crypto exchange accounts.

Jed Finn, Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management, told Bloomberg that Zerohash’s underlying technology has been proven and integrating it into the E*Trade platform means “clients should have access to digitized assets, traditional assets, and cryptocurrencies, all in the same ecosystem that they’re used to.”

With seamless crypto trading capabilities, new customers who want both traditional investing and digital asset access in one place could join the E*Trade platform. According to a report, Morgan Stanley is preparing to begin offering crypto trading services as early as the first half of 2026. The report adds that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana will be the first cryptocurrencies supported on the platform.

Regulatory Clarity Encouraging Traditional Finance Institutions To Enter Crypto

The announcement by Morgan Stanley represents a wider trend of traditional financial institutions entering the cryptocurrency services. The pro-digital asset policy of the Trump administration has inspired more banks to consider crypto services.

In September, the SEC and CFTC declared that they would not prevent regulated exchanges from listing crypto trading instruments, easing the way for large exchanges to trade Bitcoin and other digital currencies. 

With better regulatory clarity, major financial institutions have been more at ease with cryptocurrencies. Morgan Stanley has been building its crypto capabilities over the years, and adding crypto trading to E*Trade, one of the largest online brokerage platforms in the United States, is a major leap into the digital asset space. 

Morgan Stanley is also developing an asset-allocation framework to give clients exposure to crypto assets of zero to a few percentage points, based on the goals of the investor. The bank is also looking at using tokenization to enhance the back-office efficiencies, including settlement and clearing.

Zerohash CFO Adam Berg said in a statement that more financial giants are lining up to dive into crypto. Adam said that he 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.