Charles Schwab unveils its long-awaited crypto investing product, Schwab Crypto, with a 0.75% fee on every crypto trade and plans to launch in the coming weeks
Charles Schwab on Thursday introduced its long-awaited crypto investing product, making bitcoin and ether trading available to clients …
Context & Ripple Effects
Schwab’s launch follows years of involvement in crypto-market infrastructure through EDX Markets and makes bitcoin and ether trading available directly to its clients. The related coverage also shows UBS preparing limited private-bank access and Morgan Stanley testing crypto trading through E*Trade, indicating that large wealth and brokerage firms are moving from indirect exposure toward in-platform execution.
The fee is consequential because Morgan Stanley’s subsequent E*Trade pilot is described as charging less than Schwab as well as Coinbase and Robinhood. That puts pricing, not merely product availability, at the center of the brokerage competition.
First-order effects
- Schwab clients gain a native channel for bitcoin and ether trades when Schwab Crypto launches, rather than needing a separate crypto venue for those transactions.
- Schwab establishes a 0.75% per-trade price point, creating an explicit cost benchmark for its crypto offering.
Second-order effects
- Morgan Stanley and other brokerages face pressure to differentiate on trading fees, rollout scope, or integration with existing brokerage and wealth-management accounts; E*Trade’s lower-priced pilot is an early example.
- Crypto-focused platforms and retail brokers must compete more directly for customers who value keeping traditional investments and crypto activity within one established brokerage relationship.
Third-order effects
- If these launches progress beyond pilots, crypto trading is likely to become a standard brokerage feature offered alongside conventional investing, shifting competition toward custody, account integration, and price rather than standalone access.
- The pattern remains uneven: firms are starting with bitcoin and ether and, in UBS’s case, a limited client segment, suggesting mainstream adoption will be shaped by controlled product scope as much as demand.
The trend: Large brokerages and wealth firms are progressively embedding narrowly scoped crypto trading into existing investment platforms, with fees becoming a key competitive lever.