Fidelity Investments launches Fidelity Digital Assets, making it easy for institutions to invest in crypto

Fidelity Investments, one of the largest and most diversified financial service firms in the world, has launched Fidelity Digital Asset Services, LLC, a new company that will provide enterprise-quality trade execution and custody of digital assets to institutional investors including market intermediaries, family offices, and hedge funds.

Speaking about the new company, the CEO and Chairman of Fidelity Investments, Abigail P. Johnson, said:

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.

Creating a foundation for institutional-quality solutions

According to Fidelity, the first step in realising the future for cryptocurrencies is creating a foundation for institutional-quality solutions that will help advance the industry. The company acknowledges that while there are numerous retail service providers in the cryptocurrency space, there is a lack of support for large institutional investment.

The new company is expected to provide solutions that institutional investors have been demanding. With rich experience serving over 13,000 institutions to date, Fidelity Investments believe that it’s ideally suited for the job.

Fidelity Investment surveys

Recent research by Fidelity Investment, titled the Fidelity Global Institutional Investor Survey, discovered that 70% of institutional clients believed that new asset classes will likely come up as a result of adavancing technologies, including blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

To enable its clients to invest in this new asset class, Fidelity Digital Assets will offer institutional-grade custody of digital assets, trade execution at multiple market venues, and dedicated client services.

The founding head of Fidelity Digital Assets, Tom Jessop, concluded:

In our conversations with institutions, they tell us that in order to engage with digital assets in a meaningful way, they need a trusted platform provider to enter this space.

These institutions require a sophisticated level of service and security, equal to the experience they’re used to when trading stocks or bonds. With Fidelity Digital Assets, we’re building a scalable infrastructure for digital assets that meets the expectations of what it means to work with Fidelity, while leveraging unique capabilities of the blockchain to create a completely new offering.