MSBT has attracted over $103M in net inflows within its first week, surpassing WisdomTree WBTC ($86M accumulated since January 2024) and marking Morgan Stanley's most successful ETF launch ever. The 0.14% fee fund now has six consecutive days of inflows, while Goldman Sachs filed for a competing Bitcoin income ETF and BlackRock is preparing its own income-focused product.
MSBT has attracted over $103M in net inflows within its first week, surpassing WisdomTree WBTC ($86M accumulated since January 2024) and marking Morgan Stanley's most successful ETF launch ever. The 0.14% fee fund now has six consecutive days of inflows, while Goldman Sachs filed for a competing Bitcoin income ETF and BlackRock is preparing its own income-focused product.
Morgan Stanley's spot Bitcoin ETF, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), has surpassed $100 million in net inflows within its first week of trading — making it the firm's most successful ETF launch in history, according to digital assets head Amy Oldenburg.
The fund added $19.3 million in inflows on Wednesday alone, bringing total net inflows to $103 million. That figure has now overtaken the WisdomTree Bitcoin Fund (WBTC), which has accumulated just $86 million since launching in January 2024 — meaning MSBT collected more in 8 days than WisdomTree gathered in 15 months.
MSBT launched on April 8 at a market-low 0.14% expense ratio, undercutting the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) by one basis point. The fund tracks the CoinDesk Bitcoin Benchmark 4 PM New York Settlement Rate.
Three things make the MSBT first-week milestone significant:
Distribution beats price. Morgan Stanley isn't winning on fees alone — they're winning because they have 15,000+ financial advisors managing trillions in client assets. When those advisors recommend a Bitcoin allocation, MSBT is the default. This is the 'advisory channel' advantage that no crypto-native firm can replicate.
It validated the Goldman response. Goldman Sachs filed for its Bitcoin Premium Income ETF on April 14 — one week after MSBT launched. The timing is not coincidental. Goldman saw Morgan Stanley's first-day numbers and accelerated its filing. Nate Geraci, president of NovaDius Wealth Management, said: 'I wouldn't be surprised to see firms like JPMorgan soon follow suit.'
The ETF shelf is getting crowded — fast. MSBT now sits alongside 11 other spot Bitcoin ETFs. Continuing momentum could see it surpass Invesco Galaxy (BTCO, $245M), Valkyrie (BRRR, $326M), and Franklin (EZBC, $375M) — all of which had 15-month head starts. Meanwhile, BlackRock is preparing an income-focused Bitcoin ETF, and Goldman's options-based product is in the pipeline.
The Wall Street Bitcoin ETF arms race has accelerated dramatically:
MSBT is still tiny compared to IBIT. But it's growing faster than any non-BlackRock competitor did in its first week, and it has the distribution network to keep accelerating.
Ondo Finance launched Ondo Intelligent Portfolios, a new onchain product category delivering portfolios built on strategies developed by BlackRock for Ondo as single transferable tokens. Three tokens went live today — High Income, Diversified Growth, High Growth — with smart-contract-level rebalancing, available to eligible investors outside the US.
US spot bitcoin ETFs have swung to net inflows of roughly $320M for 2026 (Bloomberg tally; ~$349M per Askthetape) — the first positive year-to-date print since April — after investors added about $4.6B since Aug 19, erasing a $5.69B deficit accumulated by July 13. BlackRock's IBIT captured ~$1.02B over four sessions as Bitcoin rallied ~35% from ~$64,100 to an eight-month high of $87,265.
On Monday, Sept 21, the European Central Bank switched on Pontes, a platform linking distributed-ledger markets to the Eurosystem's TARGET Services so eligible banks and market infra providers can settle tokenized bonds and funds in central-bank money. Christine Lagarde announced the go-live at Friday's Eurogroup, calling it 'a digital euro made available for banks.' It lands three days after the SEC's Innovation Exemption opened onchain trading of tokenized US stocks — the institutional tokenization race is now transatlantic.