Final Testing Stages are Commencing for Fidelity Digital Assets’ Cryptocurrency Platform

Fidelity is one of the biggest names in American financial services, so their recent decision to get involved in the cryptocurrency industry gained a lot of hype.

A recent update on the company’s Medium blog revealed that they are now in the “final testing and process refinement periods” of the platform before launch.

According to the announcement, the present services are available for a small group of clients to participate in, though there’s still infrastructure work to complete. By understanding the way that clients use the platform, Fidelity can better adjust the infrastructure to meet their needs.

In the blog, Fidelity says, “Our conversations with a variety of institutions have served to underscore their clear need for a trusted platform provider in order to engage with digital assets in a meaningful way. We are committed to exceeding the requirements and standards of existing solutions with both our custody platform and trading venue — providing a combination of security and a central point of market access, disrupting the obfuscated nature of trading digital assets today.”

The cryptocurrency platform development was originally announced in October last year, which came with the new company Fidelity Digital Asset Services. The goal is that the platform will make it possible to act as a custodian and offer trade execution services.

Their main audience includes “hedge funds, family offices, and market intermediaries,” though they still hope to bring in the big investors already in the crypto industry.

The announcement today includes details on the way that the company has been involving auditors in the process to confirm that they are following the compliance required of them by the regulators and that they “adapt existing operational processes” to the platform.

An update on our work. https://t.co/EkJ2pWJt2Y

— Fidelity Digital Assets (@DigitalAssets) January 31, 2019

Unnamed sources spoke with Bloomberg this week about the development on the platform, saying that the launch could happen as soon as March of this year. The updated does not confirm this, but earlier statements from Fidelity indicate that their intention is to launch by the end of the first quarter this year.