Fidelity’s Cryptocurrency Market Influence and Impact Has Been Years In the Making

Fidelity And Its Influence in The Cryptocurrency Market

Fidelity Digital Asset Services took the decision to enter the cryptocurrency market. This decision has surprised most of the cryptocurrency market. Fidelity is the fourth-largest asset management company all over the world. Nevertheless, the company was already mining Bitcoin back in 2015. That means that the firm has experience in the cryptocurrency world.

Fidelity Digital Asset Services will be operating in the crypto market as soon as 2019. The main intention is to make digital assets more accessible to investors. It seems that there is an increased level of institutions trying to invest in the market but the infrastructure necessary to do it is not yet available. Fidelity is working to make that possible and reduce the gap between virtual currencies and institutional or wealthy investors.

Abigail P. Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Fidelity, commented about it:

“Our goal is to make digitally-native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors. We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.”

Institutional clients will be provided with liquidity from multiple cryptocurrency exchanges. Fidelity Digital Asset will be using its smart order routing system to offer the necessary liquidity to investors. At the same time, the company will combine the service will institutional-grade custody for cryptographic assets. The custody solution will involve cold storage wallets, cyber controls and more. This would allow clients to be sure that the funds and cryptocurrencies are stored in a compliant manner with the highest security standards.

Fidelity will be giving institutions, family offices, hedge funds and others, the necessary tools that they require to manage their investments in the crypto world. This would allow institutions to securely store their virtual currency assets and trade them with different liquidity providers.

The financial services company has been working with blockchain technology and crypto assets since 2014. The initial research was conducted by Fidelity Labs and the company began mining Bitcoin in 2015. During 2016, the company initiated different proof of concepts and formed new academic and industry partnerships.

The company has also enabled clients to purchase virtual currencies using their online accounts after signing a partnership with Coinbase. An additional thing to mention is that Fidelity’s staff was able to purchase things at the local cafeteria using Bitcoin.

Fidelity will be focusing on institutional investors rather than on retail users. It will be possible for family offices,hedge funds and pension funds to start investing in virtual currencies.

The financial services company has $7.2 trillion dollars of assets under management and works with 13,000 different institutions from all over the world. With the new services provided by Fidelity, institutional investors would be able to smoothly enter the crypto market.

Tom Jessop, head of Fidelity Digital Asset Services, said that they started exploring blockchain technology several years ago. After all these efforts they were able to create Fidelity Digital Assets and offer crypto services for enterprises.

Fidelity could manage to capitalize the benefits of being one of the first companies offering solutions related to virtual currencies to institutions. This could also help Bitcoin to reach new highs in the near future.