BTC Weekly: Week 15 (2026)

Morgan Stanley became the first major U.S. bank to issue its own spot Bitcoin ETF, launching MSBT on April 8 at a 0.14% sponsor fee — the lowest of any Bitcoin ETP currently trading.

Coinbase and BNY provide custody, with BNY also serving as administrator and transfer agent and the fund benchmarked to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Benchmark Rate Index. At 0.14%, MSBT undercuts BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) — the market's dominant product at 0.25% — creating the first direct fee-based competition from a bank-issued instrument since spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024. First-day trading cleared $34 million in volume, which Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas placed in the top 1% of all ETF launches on record. The distribution advantage is structural: Morgan Stanley's wealth management network spans 16,000 financial advisors overseeing $6.2 trillion in client assets — capital that previously had no in-house Bitcoin vehicle and required clients to access competing products through outside platforms.

(Bloomberg, Fortune)

StarkWare CPO Avihu Levy published a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction scheme on April 9 that requires no soft fork, no miner signaling, and no changes to Bitcoin's existing consensus rules.

Named QSB, the approach relies on RIPEMD-160 pre-image resistance — a hash function quantum computers can only attack via Grover's algorithm, which yields a quadratic rather than exponential speedup, leaving approximately 118 bits of effective pre-image security at the recommended configuration. Each transaction costs $75–$150 in GPU compute, works entirely within legacy script rules, and reaches miners directly without routing through normal mempool infrastructure. Protection applies only to newly created outputs; the estimated 4 million BTC held in legacy P2PK addresses — the format most vulnerable to a capable quantum adversary — remains unaffected. Levy describes QSB as a last-resort contingency measure rather than a substitute for a forthcoming protocol-level upgrade, and notes it cannot be used with the Lightning Network.

(CoinDesk, Unchained)