Shares of Overstock (OSTK) are rising after Morgan Stanley (MS) disclosed that it had bought an 11.4% stake in the online retailer just days before Overstock’s cryptocurrency trading goes live.

MORGAN STANLEY BUYS OVERSTOCK STAKE: Morgan Stanley reported in a regulatory filing on Friday that it had purchased an 11.4% stake in Overstock, which is launching cryptocurrency trading with its tZERO subsidiary on December 18, The New York Post reported. The move comes as Wall Street banks review options to enter into the cryptocurrency space and amid Overstock developing new uses for bitcoin technology. Overstock, which has accepted bitcoin (BTC) as payment since 2014, recently began to hold 50% of bitcoins used in transactions.

TZERO LAUNCH: tZERO said on November 16 that the company’s token sale, utilizing a simple agreement for future tokens will begin on December 18. The company confirmed that tokens will provide investors with token characteristics including revenue participation in the form of a distribution to be a percentage of tZERO’s revenue and utility to pay for fees and services within the tZERO ecosystem.

SHORT INTEREST: Short interest in Overstock.com increased to 40.9% of the shares available to trade on November 30 from 32.4% on November 15, according to the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. A total of 7.32M shorted shares were sold as of November 30, equivalent to 2.2 days of average trading volume, which compared to 5.8M shorted shares, or 1.7 days of average volume as of the November 15.

REVIEW OF STRATEGIC ALTERNATIVES: Overstock disclosed on its November 9 earnings conference call that it engaged Guggenheim to review its strategic alternatives. The company added that it is considering a number of options, including combining with a brick-and-mortar company or recapitalizing. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne later wrote, “I have indicated for about 18 months — and loud-and-clear in the last earnings call — that I hear the Gods of Economics whispering that the best model is a brick-and-click model, and that around the end of 2017 I would be working on exploring such a hybridization, which could take various forms.

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