Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence has identified and publicly labeled the custodian wallets backing Morgan Stanley’s spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), giving any observer the ability to track the fund’s BTC holdings in near real-time. The fund, ticker MSBT, launched on April 8, 2026, on NYSE Arca, making Morgan Stanley the first major U.S. bank to issue a spot bitcoin ETF. The firm manages roughly $9.3 trillion in client assets, placing the product squarely in view of traditional finance audiences who previously had no comparable onchain tracking tool.
Labeling Details and Holdings
Arkham’s in-house analytics team identified three wallet addresses connected to MSBT’s custodians, Coinbase and BNY Mellon, before publishing verified entity labels on its platform. As of approximately April 18, 2026, those wallets held 1,348 BTC valued at around $102.08 million, based on a bitcoin price in the $75,700 to $76,000 range. The firm announced the labeling publicly on X, noting that MSBT had purchased $83.6 million worth of bitcoin since inception and held $64.4 million across its onchain addresses at the time. Holdings have grown since then.
Recent inflows documented by Arkham include a transfer of 177.757 BTC (~$13.75 million) arriving roughly 23 hours before publication, and a 209.296 BTC deposit (~$15.47 million) three days prior. Multiple other deposits ranging from 80 to 415 BTC were logged during the fund’s first two weeks, with no significant outflows reported.
Lowest Fee and Market Impact
MSBT carries an expense ratio of 0.14%, the lowest among major U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs. Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) charges 0.25%. On its first trading day, MSBT recorded approximately $34 million in volume, ranking in the top 1% of all ETF launches over the prior year, according to Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas. Net assets reached roughly $87 million after about five trading days.
Spot bitcoin ETFs operate on a T+1 settlement cycle, meaning onchain transfers appear with roughly a one-day lag after public creation or redemption announcements. Arkham’s dashboard reflects those flows once settled, offering near real-time visibility once the blockchain records the transaction. The three labeled addresses carry partial public prefixes: bc1qa…, bc1qe…, and bc1qn…. Arkham groups these into a single entity page displaying aggregated balances, inflow/outflow charts, and full transaction history. However, Arkham may not have identified all of the bank’s addresses, as Morgan Stanley’s website indicates it holds 1,820.60 BTC as of April 17, 2026.
Significance for Institutional Transparency
Arkham published a detailed research article on April 17 walking through its identification methodology. The platform now covers more than 450,000 entity pages and billions of address tags across exchanges, governments, asset managers, DeFi protocols, and individual wallets. For comparison, Arkham tracks Coinbase custody wallets, Grayscale wallets, and Blackrock’s IBIT-related addresses, as well as U.S. government holdings of over 328,000 BTC. What Morgan Stanley’s MSBT labeling adds is a live window into a Wall Street institution’s bitcoin accumulation that previously would have required waiting for regulatory filings. Retail and institutional observers can now watch inflows and outflows from the same screen.