Week 15 (2026) · BTC Weekly

Morgan Stanley launched the first spot Bitcoin ETF issued directly by a major U.S. bank — undercutting every existing product on price.

MSBT launched April 8 at a 0.14% sponsor fee — undercutting BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) at 0.25%, the market's dominant product, marking the first direct fee-based competition from a bank-issued instrument since spot ETFs launched in January 2024. Coinbase and BNY provide custody, with BNY also serving as administrator and transfer agent. 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 16,000 financial advisors oversee $6.2 trillion in client assets — capital that previously had no in-house Bitcoin vehicle.

That network is now a direct distribution channel for Bitcoin exposure at the lowest fee of any U.S.-listed ETP.

(Bloomberg, Fortune)

A quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction scheme published this week requires no protocol changes — and no miner consensus.

Named QSB, the scheme was published April 9 by StarkWare CPO Avihu Levy and works entirely within Bitcoin's existing script rules — no soft fork, no miner signaling required. It 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 roughly 118 bits of effective security. Each transaction costs $75–$150 in GPU compute and routes directly to miners outside the normal mempool. The tradeoffs are significant: protection applies only to newly created outputs, Lightning Network compatibility is absent, and the estimated 4 million BTC in legacy P2PK addresses — the most quantum-vulnerable format — remains unaffected.

Levy frames QSB explicitly as a last-resort contingency, not a replacement for a protocol-level upgrade — but it establishes that a quantum emergency response exists within Bitcoin's current ruleset, requiring no one's permission to deploy.

(CoinDesk, Unchained)