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- 🐳 Weekly Edition: Morgan Stanley Joins BTC ETF Battle as Crypto Bleeds
🐳 Weekly Edition: Morgan Stanley Joins BTC ETF Battle as Crypto Bleeds
We also saw one of the more hilarious attempts at insider trading today, put on by none other than VC-backed P2P.me
Beluga & Will McKinnon
March 27, 2026
It was another rough week for crypto and the broader market, and many of the talking heads are speculating Trump is waiting for the weekend before delivering bad news. Oil prices remain elevated as it seems like the Iran-US ceasefire negotiations have produced a lot more noise than progress, which probably comes as a surprise to nobody.
Likely the most important structural development this week was Morgan Stanley’s amended S-1 filing for its spot Bitcoin ETF, which revealed a management fee of 14 basis points… in other words, they’re undercutting ever existing spot BTC ETF on the market by significant margin. It will be interesting to watch the reshuffling occur once this goes live, with approval expected soon.
Aside from drawing capital from the existing ETF providers, this could also represent the start of a major liquidity influx. As a wealth manager Morgan Stanley oversees $5.5 trillion in capital with over 15,000 financial advisors, and already recommends up to a 4% portfolio allocation into BTC. A 2% allocation across the board would total $160 billion, roughly 3x the size of BlackRock’s IBIT.
Before we wrap up the week, I wanted to highlight a funny story from the onchain world today: peer-to-peer onramp P2P.me caught attention for insider trading their own raise prediction on Polymarket. Ever since Polymarket began offering markets on raise totals there have been allegations of teams doing the same thing, but it’s usually hard to prove.
In this case however it looks like the P2P intern forgot he named his Polymarket account “P2P Team”, and used insider knowledge of the raise amounts and foundation money to net about $15k on the trade. For a team backed by Coinbase Ventures and Multicoin Capital, this is incredibly shameless (but also pretty funny).
This is my quant
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