Wall Street Giant Fidelity opens Bitcoin and crypto currency trading

Fidelity, the fourth largest asset manager in the world, yesterday officially announced that it will launch a new company called Fidelity Digital Assets to launch a Krypto currency platform for institutional investors. The company will host a crypto trading platform and custody solutions and will include Bitcoin, Ethereum and other previously unnamed crypto currencies.

With 27 million customers and $7.2 trillion in client assets, Fidelity Investments is a true giant among financial services providers worldwide. Referring to the great institutional demand for crypto currency products, the company decided to found Fidelity Digital Assets. The company will offer its services around the clock, seven days a week, in order to keep pace with the uninterrupted nature of the crypto currency market and thus “support sophisticated institutional investors such as hedge funds and market intermediaries with custody and trade execution services for crypto currencies”.

“Our goal is to make digital-native assets such as Bitcoin more accessible to investors,” said Abigail Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments, in a press release. “We expect that we will continue to invest and experiment in the long term to make this new asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.”

Fidelity’s Tom Jessop also told CNBC that his many years of experience predestined him to prevent hacks and to keep crypto currencies safe through cold storage solutions.

We have seen that there are certain things that institutions need that only a company like Fidelity can offer. We have a technology that we have adopted from other parts of Fidelity – we can use all the resources of a large organization. […] You could look at the crypto world and say, “Wow, is this a new thing?” but we’ve been managing keys for a long time. We have used our experience in the area of corporate security, then we have through our exploration of Bitcoin and some of the people hired by us quickly developed some of the krypton-related expertise and brought the two things together.

Fidelity joins an ever growing list of financial giants who want to offer trading in crypto currencies, custody solutions and other services because they have recognized a potential and above all a huge demand from institutional investors. With the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) / Bakkt, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, several other Wall Street heavyweights have already announced the launch of Bitcoin and crypto currency products in the near future.

Cryptobull and Fundstrat Global Analyst Tom Lee said that Fidelity’s announcement contributes to the flood of evidence that institutional involvement in cryptography will be the headline for 2019.

With @fidelity launching a comprehensive range of services, it is adding to the avalanche of evidence that institutional participation in #crypto is the story of 2019. #BTC has been muted for much of 2018 highlights how actual “fiat inflows” (2019) is louder than sentiment. https://t.co/TwHxqpmFaf

– Thomas Lee (@fundstrat) October 15, 2018