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Financial services giant Morgan Stanley is reportedly giving wealth advisors approval to offer Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to wealthy clients.
According to a new report by CNBC, a major Wall Street bank is giving its wealth advisors the go-ahead to pitch BTC ETFs to its customers for the first time.
Anonymous sources familiar with the matter said that Morgan Stanley’s team of 15,000 wealth advisors can start soliciting BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund starting as soon as Wednesday.
BTC ETFs were approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January, so far bringing in billions of dollars worth of inflows to the top crypto asset by market cap.
The report says that according to a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, the firms are still forbidding their financial advisors from recommending BTC ETFs to clients and would only allow trades if the customer was pursuing the product.
However, Morgan Stanley will only be offering clients with a net worth of at least $1.5 million and the will to take speculative investing risks.
Furthermore, the report finds that the bank is keeping its eye on Ethereum (ETH)-based ETFs but hasn’t committed to providing access to them.
Earlier this year, new filings with the SEC revealed that Morgan Stanley held over $269 million worth of Grayscale’s spot market BTC ETF.
Bitcoin is trading for $63,460 at time of writing, a marginal decrease during the last 24 hours.