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.
Capital Group ($3.3T AUM) disclosed a 10.63% stake (136M shares, ~$203M) in Metaplanet, making it the largest shareholder of Japan's premier Bitcoin treasury company. The firm already holds a position in Strategy, now extending its Bitcoin treasury thesis across two jurisdictions.
T. Rowe Price, the $1.89 trillion asset manager, launched the T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETF (TKNZ) on NYSE Arca — the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto exchange-traded product in the marketplace. The fund holds a diversified portfolio across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Solana, and Hyperliquid, with active allocation adjustments led by Blue Macellari, Head of Digital Assets since 2022.
The SEC approved an immediately effective rule change quadrupling IBIT options position limits from 250,000 to 1,000,000 contracts, enabling up to $5B in notional options exposure per participant. The approval landed the same day BlackRock reported record $15.3T AUM and $191.7B Q2 inflows, even as IBIT shed $3.3B during the quarter.