Charles Schwab announced Schwab Crypto, offering direct spot BTC and ETH trading to retail clients via linked accounts with Paxos execution and 0.75% fees. With $12.2T in client assets and 39 million accounts, it's the largest traditional brokerage to offer direct crypto trading. The move caps a historic week that included Morgan Stanley's MSBT ETF launch and Goldman Sachs's Bitcoin income ETF filing.
Charles Schwab announced Schwab Crypto, offering direct spot BTC and ETH trading to retail clients via linked accounts with Paxos execution and 0.75% fees. With $12.2T in client assets and 39 million accounts, it's the largest traditional brokerage to offer direct crypto trading. The move caps a historic week that included Morgan Stanley's MSBT ETF launch and Goldman Sachs's Bitcoin income ETF filing.
Charles Schwab — America's largest discount brokerage — announced Schwab Crypto on April 16, a platform allowing retail clients to buy and sell spot Bitcoin and Ethereum directly through linked accounts. The service will roll out in phases over the coming weeks, starting with waitlisted clients.
The platform charges 0.75% per transaction, with Charles Schwab Premier Bank acting as custodian and Paxos handling trade execution. At launch, only BTC and ETH are supported, and clients cannot transfer crypto in or out of Schwab accounts.
CEO Rick Wurster had been signaling the move for months, telling CNBC last July: "What we hear from many of our clients is that they have 98% of their wealth here at Schwab and they might hold a percent or 2% at some digital native firm to hold their crypto, and they really want to bring it back to Schwab."
Four things make the Schwab Crypto launch a watershed moment:
Scale. Schwab manages $12.2 trillion across 39 million accounts. Even if 1% of clients allocate 1% of their portfolio to crypto, that's $1.2 billion in new demand. This isn't a crypto company adding stocks (Coinbase, Kraken). This is the largest traditional brokerage adding crypto.
The week that changed everything. Schwab's announcement came 48 hours after Morgan Stanley's MSBT Bitcoin ETF hit $100M in first-week inflows, and one day after Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin income ETF. Three of America's five largest banks made major crypto moves in the same week — the biggest institutional crypto week since the January 2024 spot ETF approvals.
Direct ownership, not ETFs. Schwab isn't offering a Bitcoin ETF — it's offering direct spot ownership. This is fundamentally different from Morgan Stanley's MSBT. Clients hold actual BTC and ETH, not shares of a trust. The trade-off: no SIPC/FDIC protection, but true ownership.
The consolidation thesis. Schwab's own data shows clients already hold crypto elsewhere and want to consolidate. Jonathan Craig, head of retail investing, said: "Clients who want direct access to the asset class can trade it alongside their other investments." This is about bringing off-platform crypto back home.
The traditional finance vs. crypto-native lines are blurring fast:
Schwab Crypto is intentionally minimal: no wallet transfers, no staking, no recurring buys, no limit orders. NY and LA residents are excluded. Crypto positions aren't covered by SIPC or FDIC. The IRS treats each transaction as a taxable event.
But for Schwab's client base — predominantly long-term investors managing substantial wealth — the simplicity may be a feature, not a bug.
MSBT has attracted over $103M in net inflows within its first week, surpassing WisdomTree WBTC ($86M accumulated since January 2024) and marking Morgan Stanley's most successful ETF launch ever. The 0.14% fee fund now has six consecutive days of inflows, while Goldman Sachs filed for a competing Bitcoin income ETF and BlackRock is preparing its own income-focused product.
MSBT reached $103M in AUM in just 8 days, overtaking WisdomTree's 15-month accumulation. The cheapest BTC ETF (0.14% fee) is winning through 16,000 financial advisor distribution, not just price competition.
Institutional investors poured $786M into crypto ETFs between April 10-13, approaching $1B in weekly inflows. For the first time, ETH ETFs outpaced BTC ETFs as Ethereum on-chain activity jumped 41%. Harvard's endowment rotated from BTC to ETH back in February — now the ETF flow data confirms institutional rotation is real.