Ethereum price (ETH/USD): Fidelity’s crypto unit likely to delay ETH support

Fidelity Digital Assets (FDAS) may delay adding support for Ethereum (ETH) in the wake of the digital coin’s recent hard forks, industry website Coindesk has reported.

FDAS, a crypto trading and custody subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, was unveiled last year and reportedly may make its official launch as early as this month. At this moment, the venture is ready to support Bitcoin (BTC), but it also wants to add more popular digital currencies in the future. But in the wake of Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork and with another system update, dubbed Istanbul, possibly hitting the protocol in October, FDAS prefers to take its time when it comes to the second-largest digital currency on the market.

“We’d love to have support [for] ether but you know you have a hard fork coming up and some upgrades, so I think we’re trying to see how those things work out before we make a decision to put them on the platform,” FDAS president Tom Jessop told Coindesk on Thursday.

FDAS has developed a framework for evaluation of any crypto assets that may be added to the platform in the future. The framework looks at technical details – such as how decentralised a coin is or whether a blockchain protocol has any “peculiarities” that may complicate its launch on the platform – as well as client demand. So far, the company has found significant correlation between client demand and market capitalization.

One of the goals of the platform is to ensure that investors are protected. Jessop pointed to Ethereum Classic (ETC), an Ethereum offshoot created in 2016, as a project that would require an in-depth risk assessment due to the 51 percent attack it suffered earlier this year.

In today’s trading, the Ethereum price stood at $138.18, as of 16:22 GMT. The digital coin has lost 0.3% of its value in the past 24 hours, according to data from digital currency tracker Coinmarketcap.