Morgan Stanley Launches the Cheapest Ethereum and Solana ETFs Yet, With Staking Rewards
Morgan Stanley just made owning Ethereum and Solana through a brokerage account cheaper than it’s ever been — and it’s throwing in staking rewards on top.
The bank’s new Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust (ticker MSSE) and Morgan Stanley Solana Trust (ticker MSOL) began trading this week on NYSE Arca, each carrying a 0.14% annual expense ratio — the lowest fee of any US-listed Ethereum or Solana fund currently available. That undercuts Grayscale’s Mini Ethereum Trust, which had held the previous low at 0.15%, and comes in well below Franklin Templeton’s Solana ETF, which charges 0.19%.
The bigger differentiator may be what happens with the underlying assets while investors hold the funds. Morgan Stanley says it will stake a portion of each fund’s ETH and SOL holdings to generate staking rewards, then pass 100% of those rewards directly through to investors rather than keeping a cut for itself — a structure that effectively lets a traditional brokerage account holder earn a yield that would otherwise require running a validator or using a crypto-native staking platform directly.
The launch builds on Morgan Stanley’s existing spot Bitcoin ETF, which the bank says has pulled in roughly $400 million over four months despite launching into a bearish stretch for crypto prices — a sign that demand for regulated, brokerage-account-native crypto exposure has held up even when spot prices haven’t cooperated.
For investors, the calculus is fairly simple: a lower expense ratio compounds meaningfully over years of holding, and a pass-through staking yield is a genuine improvement over funds that either don’t stake at all or keep the rewards for the issuer. For the broader ETF market, it’s another data point in a fee war that’s been quietly squeezing issuer margins across the crypto ETF space since the first spot Bitcoin funds launched — good news for investors, tighter economics for whoever’s competing to offer the product.
It’s also a reminder of how quickly crypto ETFs have expanded past Bitcoin alone. Less than two years after the first spot Bitcoin funds launched in the US, a major bank is now competing on fee and yield structure for Ethereum and Solana products specifically — treating them as established enough asset classes to fight over basis points, not just whether to offer exposure at all.
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