MSSE and MSOL match Morgan Stanley's bitcoin trust on fee. Both funds will stake a portion of their tokens and route the rewards back to investors.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management listed spot ether and solana ETPs on NYSE Arca on Tuesday, pricing both funds at 0.14 per cent — the same expense ratio the firm charges on its bitcoin trust, and lower than the products the market has been trading since spot ether ETFs cleared regulatory review.
The Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust trades as MSSE and the Morgan Stanley Solana Trust as MSOL. Both funds intend to stake a portion of their token holdings and pass any resulting rewards through to shareholders in full, with Morgan Stanley taking no cut of the yield. MSSE benchmarks to the CoinDesk Ether Benchmark 4PM NY Settlement Rate; MSOL uses the equivalent solana index.
The fee undercuts the rest of the field. Fidelity's FETH carries a 0.25 per cent expense ratio and, while its prospectus contemplates staking with a 15 per cent take, the fund is not currently distributing staking rewards. Bitwise's BSOL, the first US spot solana ETP, charges 0.20 per cent and reinvests its staking rewards into the fund rather than distributing them. That leaves Morgan Stanley alone in offering the combination of the lowest headline fee, native staking exposure, and a full pass-through in a single US-listed wrapper.
The economics of the staking pass-through cut two ways. For Morgan Stanley, giving up the yield share is a customer acquisition cost dressed up as a product feature: the fund still earns its management fee, and the marginal AUM from being visibly cheaper than the incumbent products should more than offset the give-up. For every other issuer, it forces a decision. Any fund keeping any portion of staking rewards is now measurably more expensive after yield, and the CoinDesk index construction makes the comparison trivial for any advisor running screens on cost.
The launches sit inside a broader platform build-out. Morgan Stanley's ETF and ETP business now runs more than $14 billion across 22 products, and MSSE and MSOL are the third and fourth digital-asset trusts on the shelf. The Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), which the firm launched earlier in 2026, had gathered more than $381 million by mid-July — a modest but consistent number in a category that saw net outflows across the wider spot bitcoin ETF cohort over the same period.
Both new trusts add operational surface the bitcoin fund never needed. Staking ether at institutional scale requires either a validator relationship or delegation into a staked-ether wrapper. Solana ETPs run through native delegation to a whitelisted validator set, and the choice of which validators to use materially affects yield and slashing exposure. Morgan Stanley has not disclosed its staking partners. BSOL uses Coinbase Custody with Helius as the staking operator; a large bank running the same play through a different combination of custodian and operator would be one of the first datapoints on how the industry is choosing to split those functions.
The regulatory ground under all of this was cleared in stages. The SEC cleared spot ether ETFs in mid-2024 without a staking component and only permitted staking-inclusive versions this year after a series of rule amendments to NYSE Arca's generic listing standards. Spot solana ETPs followed in the first half of 2026 under the same framework. Morgan Stanley's launch is the first product from a top-five wirehouse to combine spot exposure, staking yield, and a full investor pass-through in the same fee schedule.
The trusts arrive at an awkward moment for the wider spot ether category. US spot bitcoin ETFs are on pace for their weakest month on record, and spot ether funds have followed the same trajectory into a second consecutive month of net redemptions, according to Farside Investors data. Solana ETPs have fared better since Bitwise opened the category, but the whole cohort remains a rounding error against the roughly $60 billion in assets in US spot bitcoin funds. A wirehouse-branded product with a genuine cost advantage is the kind of thing that can shift allocations at the margin, though issuers have been saying the same about every incremental ether launch for eighteen months.
The MSBT precedent is the only real evidence for how MSSE and MSOL will trade. That fund built its book slowly, without any single-day inflow event, and its distribution ran almost entirely through Morgan Stanley's own wealth channel rather than direct retail. If the ether and solana trusts follow the same path, the growth will show up in monthly rather than daily prints, and the AUM ceiling will be capped by whatever the firm's advisor network is willing to allocate to non-bitcoin digital assets. That number remains the one nobody at Morgan Stanley has quoted publicly.
