Arkham brings onchain visibility to Morgan Stanley’s bitcoin ETF
Blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence has identified and publicly labeled the custodian wallets associated with Morgan Stanley’s spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund, MSBT. The move gives market participants a new way to monitor the fund’s bitcoin holdings and transfers using public blockchain data, rather than waiting solely for regulatory disclosures or official fund updates.
According to the report, Arkham’s internal research team linked three wallets to the ETF’s custody structure and published verified labels on its platform. The wallets are tied to custodians Coinbase and BNY Mellon. As of around April 18, 2026, those labeled addresses held a combined 1,348 BTC, worth about $102.08 million based on bitcoin trading in the $75,700 to $76,000 range.
Arkham also said publicly on X that since launch, MSBT had purchased about $83.6 million worth of bitcoin and at one point showed around $64.4 million across the addresses visible onchain through its dashboard. The balances later increased, highlighting how wallet-level tracking can reveal changes in ETF exposure as transactions settle on the blockchain.
MSBT’s launch puts a major Wall Street bank onchain
MSBT launched on April 8, 2026 on NYSE Arca, making Morgan Stanley the first major U.S. bank to issue a spot bitcoin ETF. That distinction matters because Morgan Stanley oversees roughly $9.3 trillion in client assets, placing the product squarely within the mainstream traditional finance universe.
Before Arkham’s labeling, observers had limited ability to follow the ETF’s bitcoin accumulation in a transparent, wallet-by-wallet format. The publication of these addresses creates a live onchain window into how a large Wall Street institution is building or adjusting its bitcoin position through an ETF wrapper. For traders, analysts, and institutional allocators, this narrows the information gap between blockchain-native participants and conventional finance investors.
Arkham’s dashboard groups the labeled wallets into a single entity page and displays aggregate balances, inflow and outflow charts, and transaction history. The three publicly referenced wallet prefixes are bc1qa…, bc1qe…, and bc1qn…. That structure allows users to follow visible movements in and out of the ETF’s known custody wallets with much greater granularity than traditional periodic filings provide.
Recent inflows highlight growing bitcoin holdings
The report points to multiple recent transfers into the ETF’s tracked wallets. One transaction of 177.757 BTC, worth roughly $13.75 million, arrived around 23 hours before publication. Another deposit of 209.296 BTC, valued at approximately $15.47 million, was recorded about three days earlier. Arkham also logged several additional deposits ranging from 80 BTC to 415 BTC during the fund’s first two weeks.
Notably, the report said there had been no significant outflows at the time. That matters because continued net inflows can indicate rising investor demand for the ETF. While onchain transfers do not always capture the full context of ETF creations and redemptions in real time, they do provide useful directional evidence once settlements appear on the blockchain.
The article also noted a discrepancy between Arkham’s labeled balances and Morgan Stanley’s official website. While Arkham’s identified wallets showed 1,348 BTC as of the referenced date, Morgan Stanley’s own site indicated the fund held 1,820.60 BTC as of April 17, 2026. This suggests Arkham may not yet have identified every address related to the ETF’s custody arrangement, a common limitation in attribution-based blockchain analytics.
Low fees strengthen MSBT’s competitive positioning
MSBT has also stood out on cost. The fund carries an expense ratio of 0.14%, which the report described as the lowest among major U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs. For comparison, Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBIT, charges 0.25%. In a category where fee compression is an important battleground, a lower expense ratio may help Morgan Stanley attract cost-sensitive investors seeking bitcoin exposure through a regulated investment product.
Early trading data also points to a strong debut. On its first trading day, MSBT recorded about $34 million in volume and ranked in the top 1% of all ETF launches over the prior year, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas. After roughly five trading days, net assets had climbed to around $87 million. Those figures suggest that investor interest materialized quickly after launch, even before broader public visibility into the ETF’s custody wallets became available.
Near real-time tracking comes with settlement lag
Although Arkham’s dashboard provides significantly more transparency, the report emphasizes that spot bitcoin ETFs generally operate on a T+1 settlement cycle. That means onchain transfers typically appear with about a one-day delay after public creation or redemption activity is announced. In practice, users are not seeing a perfect live feed of every primary-market event at the exact moment it happens. Instead, they gain near real-time visibility once the corresponding blockchain transaction is settled and recorded.
Even with that lag, the ability to observe wallet activity directly represents a meaningful shift in market transparency. Investors can compare official ETF reports, market flows, and blockchain data in a way that was previously difficult for a large traditional financial issuer. The result is a more continuous picture of fund accumulation and custody movements.
Part of a broader trend in institutional wallet labeling
Arkham said it published a detailed research note on April 17, 2026 explaining its identification methodology. The company added that its analytics platform now covers more than 450,000 entity pages and billions of address labels spanning exchanges, governments, asset managers, DeFi protocols, and individual wallets. This broader labeling ecosystem has made it easier to place institutional crypto activity into a larger market context.
For comparison, the platform already tracks Coinbase custody wallets, Grayscale-related addresses, and Blackrock’s IBIT-linked wallets. It also maintains an entity page for the U.S. government that reportedly shows more than 328,000 BTC in seized assets, though such figures can change as labels are updated and prices move.
Against that backdrop, the addition of Morgan Stanley’s MSBT is significant because it extends transparent onchain monitoring deeper into the core of Wall Street. Rather than waiting for delayed reporting cycles, both retail and institutional observers can now monitor visible inflows and outflows from a major bank-sponsored bitcoin ETF on the same interface used to track exchanges, governments, and crypto-native funds.
In effect, Arkham’s labeling of MSBT bridges two worlds: traditional finance product structures and public blockchain transparency. While the labeled wallets may not yet represent the ETF’s full address set, they already offer a much clearer picture of how one of the most prominent new bitcoin funds is building its holdings.