Morgan Stanley’s New ETH and SOL Funds Pay You Staking Rewards Automatically
Morgan Stanley's MSSE and MSOL launched at a 0.14% fee, the cheapest ETH and SOL funds in the US — and they pass staking rewards straight to you.
If you’ve ever wanted exposure to Ethereum or Solana through a normal brokerage account, without dealing with wallets, seed phrases or staking dashboards, Morgan Stanley just made that a lot cheaper. On July 28, the bank’s asset management arm began trading two new funds — the Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust (MSSE) and the Morgan Stanley Solana Trust (MSOL) — on NYSE Arca, each charging just a 0.14% expense ratio.
That fee undercuts every other ETH and SOL fund currently trading in the US, according to both CryptoPotato and Blockonomi. Grayscale’s Mini Ethereum Trust previously held the low mark for ether funds at 0.15%, while Franklin Templeton’s SOEZ was the cheapest Solana product at 0.19%. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas reportedly called Morgan Stanley’s pricing “the cheapest in the U.S. and world” when the filings first surfaced.
Why the staking part actually matters
Here’s the part that matters most for everyday holders: both trusts don’t just track the price of ETH and SOL, they also stake a portion of the coins they hold, and hand those rewards back to the people who own shares in the fund. “MSIM will not retain any portion of the rewards earned by either ETP for itself,” the firm said in its announcement.
In plain terms, staking is how proof-of-stake blockchains like Ethereum and Solana pay out rewards to people who lock up coins to help secure the network. Normally you’d need to do that yourself through an exchange or a wallet. With MSSE and MSOL, the fund does the staking on your behalf — through providers Figment, Galaxy and Coinbase Canada, with service fees capped at 5% — and passes the extra yield through to shareholders. Filing documents put staking targets at 50% to 80% of the ether held and up to 100% of the Solana held.
This has only recently become possible without creating an extra tax headache. The US Treasury and IRS published Revenue Procedure 2025-31 in November, a safe harbor that lets an exchange-traded product stake a single proof-of-stake asset and pass the rewards to investors without triggering a separate tax event. It requires a third-party custodian to hold the private keys, an independent staking provider, and SEC-approved disclosures — boxes Morgan Stanley says its structure ticks.
Building on the bitcoin trust
MSSE and MSOL follow the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (MSBT), which launched earlier this year as the first crypto ETP from a US bank-affiliated asset manager. MSBT pulled in $34 million in first-day trading volume and had grown to more than $381 million in assets under management through July 16, according to both outlets. It charges the same 0.14% fee as the two new funds.
“Since introducing our first ETFs in 2023, we’ve built a diversified suite of ETFs and ETPs that now exceed $14 billion in assets under management,” said Ally Wallace, Global Head of ETFs at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. The bank’s ETF and ETP lineup now runs to 22 products in total, with three of them tied directly to digital assets. MSSE tracks the CoinDesk Ether Benchmark 4PM NY Settlement Rate, while MSOL follows the equivalent CoinDesk Solana Benchmark.
What it means for your coins
For everyday holders, this is another sign that owning crypto through a regular brokerage account keeps getting simpler and cheaper. A low fee combined with automatic staking rewards means less friction between holding ETH or SOL directly and holding a fund version of it — though you’re still trading direct ownership of your coins for shares in a trust managed by a bank. As with any fund, fees, tracking accuracy and counterparty setup are worth understanding before you buy in, even at a rock-bottom 0.14%.
Read more: Ether Keeps Bouncing Off $2K — Here’s What the Chart Battle Means for Your ETH
