According to a Thursday report by Bloomberg, banking giant Morgan Stanley is working on the rollout of cryptocurrency trading with numerous digital asset firms.
Morgan Stanley's cryptocurrency trading plans are in their infancy, the report says.
The sixth-largest U.S. bank by total assets intends to allow its customers to buy crypto via the E-Trade electronic payments and brokerage platform that was acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2020 for $13 billion. This could potentially happen next year, according to Bloomberg.
Following the above-mentioned acquisition, the banking giant boasts a substantial share of the online trading market, which replaced traditional trading houses of the likes of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch.
Morgan Stanley's potential move into crypto trading shows the increasing convergence of traditional finance with the nascent asset class, which has been gaining growing institutional acceptance.
The bank was likely prompted to explore digital assets due to the emergence of a significantly more favorable environment for digital assets in the U.S.
Of course, Morgan Stanley has dipped its toes into crypto before. As reported by U.Today, the bank opened some of its institutional funds to Bitcoin back 2021.
Last August, Morgan Stanley allowed thousands of financial advisors to start pitching the Bitcoin ETFs offered by BlackRock and Fidelity to risk-tolerant wealthy clients whose total net worth exceeds $1.5 million.
In January, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick told CNBC that the banking giant was working with regulators in order to assess how to approach the crypto market safely.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin