Perhaps you think this changes everything. Or perhaps you think this changes nothing.
Either way, regarding Fidelity’s recent announcement, you’d be right.
Fidelity is spinning off a 100-person-strong company. Its mission? To provide cryptocurrency trading services for the big boys – funds, endowments, family offices, and sophisticated investors.
But don’t tell the market it’s big news.
Prices remain sluggish. For crypto markets, it changes nothing.
That’s one view, anyway. It’s just not mine.
Fidelity is using its vast resources and experience managing $7.2 trillion in investment assets to offer crypto investors the same level of security, safety, convenience and reliability it gives to its other investors…
That’s pretty big.
Even bigger than Yale and Harvard investing in crypto hedge funds… bigger than a crypto ETF being approved (one day) by the SEC… bigger than a big global bank like Northern Trust helping hedge funds invest in crypto… and, yes, bigger than the parent of the Nasdaq providing custodial and crypto trading services.
This is Fidelity, for crying out loud!
It provides clearing, custody and investment services for 13,000 institutional advisory firms and brokers. It’s the fifth-largest asset manager in the world.
And it’s all in.
Five Years in the Making
It has made its intentions crystal clear. This is not a “moonshot” experiment. This is not cracking the door slightly ajar. This is not hopping on the latest hot thing. (Besides, crypto is far from “hot” these days.)
And this is most certainly not a fly-by-night decision. It’s been five years in the making.
Fidelity’s pro-crypto leanings came to light in 2013, when it launched the Blockchain Incubator. Since then, reports have surfaced of Fidelity’s forward-looking Chairman and CEO Abigail Johnson running her own private crypto mining operation in the back rooms of the executive suite.
