Wall Street Giant Morgan Stanley Loads Up on Solana as Real-World Assets Reach $1.66B

• A recent SEC filing has revealed that Morgan Stanley has stacked up on Bitwise Solana Staking ETF and now owns over 900,000 shares, worth over $10 million.
• It also purchased shares in the Solana Company, a Nasdaq-listed firm that serves as a proxy for owning SOL.

One of Wall Street’s most iconic giants, Morgan Stanley, is building up its Solana exposure, new regulatory documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission have shown.

A Form 13F filing revealed that the bank now owns 932,922 shares in the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF, which trades under the ticker symbol BSOL. The shares were worth $15.3 million at purchase, but the ETF closed the market on Friday, trading at $11.28, bringing its value to $10.5 million. The US equities market does not open today as the country marks Presidents’ Day.

BSOL launched in October last year and trades on the New York Stock Exchange. It stakes 100% of the assets under its management, enabling investors to earn staking rewards. It holds 5.6 million SOL, worth $476 million as of the close of market last week, with each share in the ETF equating to 0.133 SOL.

Additionally, Morgan Stanley has further increased its exposure to SOL by purchasing stock from the Solana Company. The bank now holds 86,105 shares, worth $190,000. The company is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol HSDT.

As we reported last week, the company announced that it would allow institutions to borrow against their natively staked SOL tokens, which handed its stock a 23% boost.

SOL trades at $85.2 after dropping 4.5% in the past day and shedding over 40% of its value in the past 30 days. Trading volume has remained steady in the past 24 hours, with its market cap now at $48.4 billion.

Real-world asset tokenization on the network has continued rising, hitting a new all-time high of $1.66 billion, the third-largest after Ethereum and BNB Chain. However, it has the highest number of asset holders at 286,000, almost twice as many as third-placed Ethereum.

Morgan Stanley Doubles Down on Crypto

Beyond Solana, Morgan Stanley owns shares in dozens of ETFs and crypto companies as it continues to expand its crypto exposure.

It holds shares in Valkyrie’s BTC and ETH Trust, Grayscale’s BTC Trust, Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF and dozens of other crypto ETFs and company stocks.

It joins rivals like Goldman Sachs, which revealed that it owns crypto worth $2.36 billion in ETFs. BTC dominated the holdings at $1.1 billion, with XRP at $153 million. In general, crypto accounted for 0.33% of the bank’s total portfolio, but holdings increased 15% quarter-on-quarter.

The bank is also expanding its internal crypto team. It advertised on LinkedIn that it’s seeking a senior-level blockchain engineer, with DeFi expertise as one of the required skills. The post will also spearhead its tokenization efforts. In particular, the successful applicant must prove knowledgeable in four blockchains: Ethereum, Canton, Hyperledger and Polygon.