Morgan Stanley Has Filed For A De Novo National Trust Bank Charter

Find out our latest reports, listed below:

• Volatility Report: February 2026

• 2026 – the year of RWA perps?
  
  
• Bybit x Block Scholes: “2026: It's Different This Time?”

• Tokenised Markets on Bitget UEX: Unlocking Real-World Assets On-Chain for 24/7 Global Access

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• Following a third round of negotiations last week in Geneva between US and Iranian officials, over the weekend President Trump announced in a video on Truth Social that the US and Israel had launched pre-emptive airstrikes on Iran. 
• In his eight-minute long announcement, Trump claimed that the reason for the military operation was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”. 
• That followed his State of the Union speech last week where he had warned that Iran “wants to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon’”.
• Tehran responded almost immediately to the airstrikes by sending missiles of its own to neighbouring nations that hold US military bases and troops.  

• Crypto asset prices immediately fell following the announcement, though did not plunge sharply — BTC dropped from $65K to a low of $63K then slowly recovered through the later half of the weekend. ETH fell to $1,800 before also recovering its losses. 
• Later on in the weekend, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed during the joint airstrikes. 
• That helped push prices up slightly higher and BTC briefly reclaimed $68K. 
• In options markets, both BTC and ETH’s implied volatility term structures are only modestly inverted and put options currently command a premium with traders demanding downside protection, despite the recovery into Monday morning.

• While crypto markets absorbed some of the impact of the worsened geopolitical tensions given their 24-7 trading, traditional markets have only just begun to respond. 
• Stocks have sold off globally as traders retreated from risk, while oil prices and precious metals have jumped higher. 
• Equity-index futures on US stocks fell more than 1%, while European stocks as measured by the STOXX 600 are down 1.46%. 
• Brent crude oil surged more than 10% to over $80 a barrel, after Iran warned ships not to pass through the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that handles around 1/5th of the oil flow in the world. 
• Gold briefly topped $5,400 per ounce, while silver is trading above $95 per ounce. 
• Interestingly however, traders so far have not rushed to US treasuries as part of the safe haven trade — instead, treasuries fell across the curve, with the 10-year yield jumping 3bps from 3.94% to 3.97%. 

• More recently, mixed messages have circulated regarding the prospect of a resumption in talks between both sides. 
• President Trump told the Atlantic, “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long”. 
• Iranian security chief Ali Larijani, however, reputed those claims, stating that “We will not negotiate with the United States”.

• Morgan Stanley has filed for a de novo national trust bank charter under Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, which would allow it to custody digital assets and, per Bloomberg on Friday, also provide staking and trading for investment clients.
• The filing shows up on the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency site dated 18 February, though the public entry offers few additional details.

• Prediction markets have come under scrutiny after Kalshi removed a market titled “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?” stating that it does not list markets directly tied to an individual’s death and, in cases where potential outcomes could involve death, it structures rules to prevent participants from profiting from such events. 
• Kalshi is instead reimbursing all fees associated with the market. Traders who held positions before Khamenei’s death will be paid out based on the last traded price prior to his death, in line with the market’s rules, while those who entered positions afterward will receive a full reimbursement of their cost of entry.
• Polymarket has also drawn attention following reports that six accounts earned roughly $1M by wagering that the US would carry out strikes against Iran by February 28.
• The accounts were reportedly created in February, focused exclusively on bets related to the timing of potential US strikes, and in some cases placed trades just hours before the first explosions were reported in Tehran.

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed major execution-layer upgrades aimed at improving efficiency and long-term scalability, focusing on state tree changes and potential virtual machine (VM) redesign. 
• He advocates replacing Ethereum’s current Merkle Patricia Tree with a binary tree using a more efficient hash function, which would significantly reduce proof sizes, improve client-side verification, lower gas costs for certain operations, and make the network far more prover-friendly for zero-knowledge applications. 
• Buterin also has suggested moving from the EVM to a simpler, more efficient VM such as RISC-V, arguing that it would streamline the protocol, enhance proving efficiency, and better support Ethereum’s vision of general-purpose, scalable computation while maintaining backward compatibility.

• Paradigm is reportedly preparing a $1.5B fund that expands its remit into AI, robotics and other frontier technologies, while continuing to back blockchain-native projects.
• The firm is said to be using its existing technical and research-led team to evaluate opportunities outside crypto, rather than creating a separate AI unit.

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day: