The Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon has selected Coinbase, a global financial services company and crypto exchange, as the custodian for its Bitcoin Trust Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), according to a filing by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.
According to the SEC filing for the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust, custodians store all Bitcoin (BTC) in cold storage or offline methods of storing Bitcoin private keys, with a “portion” of BTC sometimes transferred to hot wallets connected to the Internet for creation and redemption. The application states:
“Bitcoin Custodians are incorporated as a New York State bank, in the case of BNY, and as a New York State limited liability trust company, in the case of Coinbase Custodians. Bitcoin Custodians provide custody and trade execution services for digital assets.”
Morgan Stanley filed SEC filings for BTC and SOL (SOL) ETFs in January. Both funds are passive investment vehicles that hold and track the prices of underlying crypto assets.
The ETF reflects growing institutional adoption of the crypto even amid a market-wide downturn that has pushed BTC down nearly 42% from an all-time high of around $126,000. BTF ETF flows have changed in recent days, and BlackRock’s $322 million Bitcoin ETF listing on Tuesday offset the withdrawal of rival funds, including Fidelity and Grayscale.
The inflows bring this week’s total to $683.3 million after last week’s inflow of $787.3 million — the first positive week after five consecutive weeks of outflows of nearly $4 billion.
related to: Morgan Stanley files for OCC bank charter for crypto holdings
The ETF gives Morgan Stanley exposure to crypto, even if it’s not a blockbuster hit
According to Jeff Park, a consultant at the asset management company BitWise, almost two years after the launch of Bitcoin ETFs in the US markets, the new fund establishes Morgan Stanley’s position in crypto and will benefit the company, even if it does not work with heavyweights such as BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust.
On the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call in January, Chairman and CEO Ted Peek told analysts that the Wall Street bank is “well positioned right now in the crypto and tokenized asset space,” adding that “there’s work for us there.”
Launching an ETF will strengthen the company’s foothold in the crypto sector while also giving it access to top crypto industry talent to build other projects such as tokenized real asset (RWA) businesses, Park said.
Conversely, the launch of a Bitcoin ETF from a major financial services firm is also “exciting” for the sector as it shows there is still a lot of “untapped” interest in the digital asset, he added.
“This means that the market is much larger than even crypto specialists anticipated, especially for reaching new customers,” he said.
Magazine: Coinbase and Base: Is Crypto Just Becoming Traditional Finance 2.0?
