Morgan Stanley bought about US$ 13.2 million in Bitcoin over the course of this week and has not recorded any sales of the asset since May, Arkham Intelligence reported, the on-chain data platform that monitors the addresses attributed to the bank.
The purchases are made by the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), the institution’s spot Bitcoin ETF — and they are not the first. Arkham reports recurring inflows since the fund’s launch, on 8 April 2026, on the NYSE Arca. The MSBT was the first spot Bitcoin ETF issued by a major American bank under its own brand, charges an annual fee of 0.14% (vs 0.25% for IBIT, by BlackRock) and has Coinbase as custodian and BNY Mellon as administrator.
In the launch week, according to Arkham, the fund bought about US$ 83.6 million in Bitcoin, with approximately 874 BTC in the monitored addresses. The balance rose to about 3,472 BTC in May and 3,779 BTC at the beginning of June. Between the 15th and 19th of that month, the platform recorded the purchase of 232 BTC, more than US$ 15 million, with no outflows. In early July, the position reached about 4,784 BTC.
Over the past two weeks, the bank added almost 1,000 BTC, raising the tracked balance to more than 5,700 BTC — about US$ 370 million based on the prices shown on the platform. Most of the flows came from Coinbase Prime addresses. Arkham ties the portfolio to 11 wallets. Dollar values vary with the Bitcoin quotation and do not represent acquisition cost.
The first month of MSBT trading ended with no days of net outflows, with about US$ 193 million in inflows.
The Bitcoin accumulated by the fund does not correspond to a proprietary position of the bank: in a spot ETF, the investors’ cash used to buy shares is converted into Bitcoin with the custodian. Therefore, the purchases seen on-chain reflect customers’ demand for the product.
Morgan Stanley manages more than US$ 8 trillion in client assets and has more than 15,000 financial advisors. In addition to MSBT, it filed S-1 records in January for Ethereum and Solana trusts, requested from the OCC in February a national fiduciary bank license for custody of digital assets, announced plans to offer retail crypto trading via E-Trade and, in June, expanded services of this kind in partnership with Galaxy Digital.