Morgan Stanley Launches Staking ETFs at 0.14%

Morgan Stanley began trading two crypto exchange-traded funds on Tuesday, both of them staking products and both priced at 0.14% a year, the lowest fee in their respective categories. The Morgan Stanley Ether ETF trades as MSSE, the Morgan Stanley Solana ETF as MSOL. Where they listed depends on which report you read: BeInCrypto had the listings on NYSE Arca, while FinanceFeeds placed them on the New York Stock Exchange. Both trusts opened small, each seeded with 50,000 shares and roughly $1 million in capital. What separates them from the first generation of spot crypto funds is that a portion of the coins they hold is put to work securing their networks, and the rewards from that work stay inside the fund.

A spot fund that also runs validators

A plain spot fund holds the asset in custody and tracks its price. A staking fund does that and then delegates some share of the holdings to validators — the operators who process transactions on a proof-of-stake network and are paid in newly issued tokens for doing so. Those rewards accrue to the trust, not to any individual shareholder, and show up as additional coins backing each share instead of a cash distribution. MSOL targets up to 100% of its holdings staked, routed through Figment, Galaxy Blockchain Infrastructure and Coinbase Canada. MSSE is capped between 50% and 80%, a limit set by Ethereum's 47-day validator entry queue, the waiting line a new validator must clear before it begins earning anything.

The split of the yield is unusually explicit. Staking providers and custodians keep 5% of gross rewards, and Morgan Stanley takes nothing beyond the sponsor fee. The remaining 95% stays with the trust and therefore with shareholders, expressed through net asset value instead of a separate payment.

A fee of 0.14% against 0.15% and 0.19%

At 0.14%, an investor pays $14 a year for every $10,000 held, before any staking rewards are counted. That undercuts Grayscale's Ethereum Mini Trust at 0.15% and Franklin Templeton's Solana ETF at 0.19%, small gaps in absolute terms but decisive in a category where products track the same asset and compete almost entirely on cost. Eric Balchunas of Bloomberg put it bluntly on launch day: "Morgan Stanley Ether and Solana ETFs are launching today.. both charge 0.14% instantly making them the cheapest in each category." Because the staking rewards reach the trust net of the providers' 5%, the fee and the yield are separate lines, not offsetting ones.

A $14 billion shelf and one four-month precedent

The firm has a single data point for how its shelf moves crypto product, and even that arrives in two sizes. Its spot bitcoin ETF, launched in April 2026, grew from $34 million to $381 million in four months by BeInCrypto's count; FinanceFeeds put the same fund at about $400 million. The two tallies do not match. Neither outlet reconciled them. Even at the higher figure, the fund is only 2.7% of the firm's ETF suite. Ally Wallace, the bank's Global Head of ETFs, framed the additions as part of a longer build: "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." The launches extend a pattern of traditional finance firms taking positions in crypto infrastructure rather than treating the asset class as a separate business.

Two assets far below their highs

Neither asset was trading anywhere near its peak at launch. Ether sat 61% below its August 2025 high and SOL 75% below its January 2025 high, with existing Solana funds holding more than $900 million between them. Flows into US crypto ETFs had been uneven through the month. Bitcoin funds put together a five-day run of inflows earlier in July worth more than $600 million, then gave some of it back; the 27 July session was a third straight day of outflows, at $11.6 million. What happens next turns on whether a staking yield and a category-low fee can pull assets toward a new entrant where incumbents already hold the distribution, and whether the 47-day queue proves a real drag on what MSSE earns.