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Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin ETF To Trade As ‘MSBT’ On NYSE

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Morgan Stanley has confirmed that its proposed spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund will trade under the ticker MSBT on NYSE Arca, according to an updated filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing outlines the structure of the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust, a passive investment vehicle designed to track the spot price of bitcoin through direct holdings. 

Shares of the trust will reflect the value of bitcoin held in custody, offering exposure through brokerage accounts without requiring direct ownership of the asset.

The trust plans to seed the fund by issuing 50,000 shares, expected to raise about $1 million in initial proceeds.

The ticker MSBT places the product alongside other spot bitcoin ETFs that launched following regulatory approvals in 2024, a shift that opened the market to traditional financial institutions.

Morgan Stanley has also appointed Coinbase Custody Trust Company as the primary bitcoin custodian. The firm will safeguard the digital assets and facilitate transfers tied to share creation and redemption. Most of the bitcoin will be held in cold storage, where private keys remain offline.

BNY Mellon will serve multiple roles, including administrator, transfer agent, and cash custodian. The bank will handle accounting, shareholder records, and cash management for the trust.

The structure follows a model used across the spot bitcoin ETF market. A portion of the fund’s holdings may move into trading wallets during periods of share creation or redemption, when authorized participants exchange cash for bitcoin or redeem shares for the underlying asset.

The filing states that custody insurance is in place but shared across multiple clients and may not cover all losses. Similar disclosures appear in other ETF filings, reflecting standard industry practice as asset managers expand into direct bitcoin exposure.

Key details remain undisclosed, including the management fee and expense ratio. These figures often play a role in investor demand, particularly in a market where fee competition among issuers has intensified.

Morgan Stanley is embracing bitcoin

Morgan Stanley first filed for the bitcoin trust in January. The latest update confirms operational details and brings the product closer to launch, pending effectiveness of the registration statement and final regulatory approval.

The move marks a deeper push by the bank into digital assets. Morgan Stanley has signaled plans to expand beyond ETFs, with efforts underway to integrate crypto trading into its E*Trade platform. The firm has also explored custody, lending, and yield-related services tied to digital assets.

At Strategy World, digital asset strategy head Amy Oldenburg described further expansion as part of the firm’s roadmap, pointing to client demand for integrated crypto services.

She said the bank intends to develop a fully integrated custody and exchange platform.

“This is a natural progression,” the executive said. “We can’t just primarily rent the technology to do this. People expect Morgan Stanley – they trust our brand – to be no fail.

Anchorage Digital expands Atlas network with collateral management for institutional crypto lending

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Anchorage Digital has expanded its Atlas network to include collateral management, adding another piece of infrastructure for institutions that want to lend against crypto without taking on the operational and counterparty risks that have long slowed the market.

The company said Atlas now supports nearly 600 participants, up fourfold from a year ago, and has processed tens of billions of dollars in settlements to date. Anchorage is pitching the new product as a regulated, always-on system for monitoring collateral, issuing margin calls, and handling liquidations across secured loans, structured products, derivatives, and other credit arrangements.

That matters because Atlas did not start as a lending product. Anchorage introduced the network in April 2024 as a settlement layer for institutions moving digital assets and dollars without escrow, omnibus accounts, or pre-funded collateral. Since then, the platform has been broadened into triparty custody and collateral workflows, showing how Anchorage is trying to turn custody into a larger capital markets business.

The timing also fits a broader push by Anchorage Digital to position itself as regulated infrastructure for institutional crypto finance. Anchorage was the first crypto firm to receive a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2021, but it is no longer alone. In December 2025, the OCC conditionally approved similar national trust bank charters for firms including Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets, signaling a wider shift toward federally regulated crypto banking.

This wave of approvals reflects growing institutional demand for bank-grade custody, settlement, and issuance infrastructure, as stablecoin issuers and crypto firms seek deeper integration with the US financial system.

Anchorage said Cantor Fitzgerald, Spark, and Kamino are already using Atlas-powered collateral management. Cantor previously selected Anchorage and Copper in March 2025 to support its Bitcoin financing business, with Anchorage serving as both custodian and collateral manager.

Spark has also worked with Anchorage to connect offchain custody with onchain credit, while Kamino recently joined Anchorage and Solana Company on a structure that lets institutions borrow against natively staked SOL held in qualified custody.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Obin AI Emerges from Stealth to Build Agentic Workforce for Financial Institutions

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Obin AI, an enterprise AI company building an agentic workforce for financial institutions, announced it has raised $7 million in seed funding led by Motive Partners. The round also includes participation from angel investors and advisors Dr. Fei-Fei Li and Lukasz Kaiser, leading figures in both foundational AI research and financial services investing.
 
Founded by AI pioneers with deep roots in both Silicon Valley and global finance, Obin AI emerges from stealth with a clear objective to make AI trustworthy at the highest levels of financial decision-making. While recent advances in agentic systems have demonstrated strong performance in coding and general business tasks, financial institutions face a higher bar. Decisions involving hundreds of millions of dollars require near-perfect accuracy, full auditability and regulatory alignment.
 
Obin AI has already secured engagements with several of the world’s largest financial institutions globally, with deployments moving from pilot to production in weeks rather than months. In select deployments, institutions have reported accuracy levels high enough to rely directly on Obin AI-generated outputs within core workflows.
 
The founding team has deep expertise in both finance and AI. Co-founder and CEO Apoorv Saxena previously served as Head of AI at JPMorgan, and prior to that ran multiple Google Cloud AI products including Translate, Contact Center AI, and other vertical products. Co-founder and CTO Dr. Valliappa (“Lak”) Lakshmanan is a longtime AI architect, former Google and Silver Lake executive, author of seven books on artificial intelligence, and contributor to foundational applied AI research.
 
Financial institutions can employ Obin’s AI agents to effectively expand their capacity, deploy capital faster, and price risk more accurately. Obin views AI not as workforce replacement, but as a way to expand institutional capacity, enabling firms to do more with greater precision while preserving human judgment.
 
Unlike platforms that require enterprises to hand over proprietary data into closed ecosystems, Obin AI is built on an open architecture model in which institutions retain full ownership and control of their models, data and intellectual property. The company’s infrastructure is intentionally designed for regulated environments, with every interaction auditable, traceable and aligned to internal governance standards.
 
The platform also addresses one of the most complex challenges in financial services, preserving decades of institutional context, when it comes to AI deployments. Financial institutions often rely on historical data, legacy documents and unstructured records that require inference and cross-referencing beyond simple document extraction. Obin AI’s architecture is designed to embed historical context into the agent layer, enabling deeper reasoning across multi-decade datasets and complex financial documents.
 
“In financial services, you can be 95 percent accurate and still be 100 percent wrong,” said Apoorv Saxena, co-founder and CEO of Obin AI. “In a regulated industry managing billions or trillions of dollars, that final margin of error determines whether AI can be trusted. We built Obin AI to solve for that ‘last mile,’ where institutions can rely on AI to support high-stakes, firmwide decisions with confidence.”
 
“In an increasingly crowded AI landscape, Obin AI stands apart,” said Ramin Niroumand, Partner, Investments & Head of Venture at Motive Partners. “Led by a veteran team with a track record of scaling production-grade AI, Obin AI understands the complexity required to deliver the long-tail reliability that financial institutions demand. With an architecture designed specifically for regulated finance and to ensure full enterprise ownership of IP, Obin AI is uniquely positioned to operationalize AI in the highest-stakes environments.”

“Obin AI has successfully bridged the gap from baseline Agentic AI outputs to production-grade performance,” said E-John Lee, Chief Operating Officer of Pinegrove Venture Partners. “This has enabled us to confidently replace an existing workflow rather than merely drive incremental efficiencies. They have been true strategic partners to Pinegrove and we highly value their focus on accurate, repeatable results.”

Sol Rally Toward $100 Fizzles As Solana Competitors Rise

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Key takeaways:

  • SOL derivatives signal bearish sentiment as funding rates hit 0% and put (sell) options trade at a premium.

  • While Solana leads in DEX volume, it faces stiff competition from Hyperliquid in the perpetual contracts sector.

Solana’s native token SOL (SOL) faced a 3-day 11% decline after peaking at $97.70 on Monday. Thursday’s move down to $87 triggered $25 million in leveraged long positions being liquidated, negatively impacting trader sentiment. SOL derivatives currently point to fear of further downside and a lack of conviction from bulls, increasing the odds of retesting the $80 level.

SOL perpetual futures annualized funding rate. Source: Laevitas.ch

The SOL perpetual futures annualized funding rate stood near 0% on Thursday, signaling a lack of demand for longs. Bears have dominated leverage demand for the past month, which is highly unusual for crypto markets as traders are historically optimistic. Moreover, the mere cost of capital and exchange risks usually drive the funding rate near 9% under neutral conditions.

SOL options markets confirm that professional traders are not comfortable that the $87 level will hold for long.

SOL 30-day options delta skew (put-call) at Deribit. Source: Laevitas.ch

The delta skew (put-call) jumped to 12% on Thursday, meaning put options traded at a premium relative to equivalent call instruments. Whales and market makers are not comfortable holding downside price exposure, even as SOL trades 70% below its all-time high. Part of this bearishness can be explained by weaker demand for the decentralized applications (DApps) industry.

Solana weekly network fees (green) vs. DApps revenue (pink), USD. Source: DefiLlama

Solana DApps revenue dropped to its lowest level in 18 months at $22 million, down from $36 million two months prior. The issue is not exclusive to Solana, as DApps revenue declined by 52% on BNB Chain over the same period, but increased competition in perpetual contracts trading is somewhat concerning as Hyperliquid dominates the industry.

Blockchains ranked by 7-day perpetual contracts volumes. Source: DefiLlama

While Solana remains the undisputed leader in decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes, driven by Pump, Raydium and Orca, the situation in synthetic derivatives is reversed. Blockchains specifically designed to handle perpetual contracts trading, such as Hyperliquid, Edgex, Zklighter and Aster, handle more than 80% of the total volume.

Related: Altseason is dead, expect shorter cycles and ‘violent’ rotations: Crypto exec

Weak onchain data and bearish derivatives delay SOL price recovery

The launch of an officially licensed S&P 500 Index perpetual futures contract on Hyperliquid has likely contributed to the weaker demand for SOL. The product offer, available for eligible users based outside of the United States, was developed by Trade[XYZ] and adds to the aggregate tokenized equities markets that nears $1.1 billion in assets.

SOL’s current $51 billion market capitalization represents a 42% discount relative to competitor BNB (BNB) at $88 billion. However, the Solana network’s total value locked (TVL) stood at $6.9 billion, while BNB Chain held $5.7 billion in TVL. More importantly, Solana’s 30-day network fees totaled $20.8 million, while BNB Chain had $9.1 million in fees, according to DefiLlama data.

Multiple companies that opted for a digital asset treasury strategy focused on SOL, such as Forward Industries (FWDI US) and DeFi Development Corp. (DFDV US) are underwater in their holdings, adding to the negative sentiment. Ultimately, the weakness in Solana onchain activity and lack of enthusiasm in derivatives markets hint that a bull run above $110 will take longer than anticipated.