A small step for Fidelity, a big step in the cryptocurrency market

Today, Boston-based financial giant Fidelity Digital Assets officially announced that New York regulators have approved their application to operate a trust business in New York State. Fidelity founder Tom Jessop said the move would expand its potential customer base to compete with coinbase custody and managed businesses such as Bakkt that already do business in New York.

In addition, the company has completed SOC1 Type 1 certification through the Big Four accounting firms. Fidelity's hosting solution is paired with a trading execution platform that allows its customers to buy and sell bitcoin through multiple liquidity sources. The platform has been running for six months, providing competitive pricing for front-end customers.

Fidelity Chief Operating Officer Michael O'Reilly said at a news conference that the move would allow Fidelity to create and launch a digital currency trading platform specifically for institutional investors, which future institutional investors can purchase with confidence in Fidelity Digital Assets. Sell, store or transfer bitcoin. Michael pointed out that Fidelity's hosting and trading services are an important basis for institutional investors to continue to participate in digital currency transactions, and the approval of New York regulators will certainly strengthen the mutual trust between institutions and other market participants.

Market analysts point out that as Fidelity, the financial giant with $2.8 trillion in assets, officially receives a “license” issued by regulators, the distance between Wall Street’s traditional financial practitioners and the world of digital currency represented by Bitcoin, It has been greatly narrowed.

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Although the digital money market has made great progress in the past few years, the large institutional investors in the traditional financial market have been cautious about this emerging market. The lack of initial supervision in the market has led to frequent prices in the cryptocurrency market. Institutional investors have always stayed away from non-systematic risk events such as manipulation or wallet hacking that led to money loss.

However, as financial giants such as Fidelity, Intercontinental Exchange, VanEck and TD Ameritrade have launched or announced the upcoming launch of regulated bitcoin trading products in the past few months, market analysts have predicted that institutional capital will surge. Into the field of cryptocurrency.

At the same time, high-risk investors or investment institutions have long begun to deploy Bitcoin and other related tools into their portfolios. Endowment funds from Harvard University and Yale University, as well as two Virginia-based pension plans, have recently invested heavily in cryptocurrency and blockchain. In addition, bitcoin prices in the second quarter have risen sharply due to the Sino-US trade disputes, which means that more and more investors have regarded Bitcoin as an effective safe-haven asset. This has laid a solid foundation for Bitcoin to “integrate” into the traditional financial market.

Take you to know the story of Fidelity

Fidelity Investment Group is currently the world's largest professional fund company. Founded in 1969, Fidelity is an international company of Fidelity Investments, founded in 1946 in Boston, USA. In 1980, Fidelity left the US parent company to operate independently.

At present, Fidelity serves customers all over the world, including central banks, sovereign wealth funds, large institutions, financial companies, insurance companies, wealth management companies and individual investors. At present, Fidelity provides services to over 27 million individual investors, with total assets exceeding US$7 trillion and fund management scale of US$2.8 trillion.

Fidelity Investment Group is good at discovering stocks of companies whose stock prices are undervalued or whose stock price lags behind market gains and has long-term investment potential. There are also many world-renowned fund managers in Fidelity Group, among which Peter Lynch is one. The most famous one, in his 13 years of managing the Magellan Fund, the average annual rate of return was 29%, while the average S&P 500 index was only 14%. When commenting on Peter Lynch, Time magazine of the United States said that he promoted the whole game to a new level. He turned investment into an art and firmly grasped every investor and saver in the country. Attention. Of course, he also gained great reputation and wealth in this game.

Since then, Fidelity has also had many outstanding fund management managers. In 1998, four fund managers in the Fidelity team were ranked among the top 20 best fund managers in the world.

Fidelity ranked 23rd in the "Top 20 Hurun Global Unicorn Active Investment Institutions List" published by Hurun Research Institute last week.

Fidelity is involved in the cryptocurrency market timeline

As the world's most famous asset management company, Fidelity attaches great importance to the emerging cryptocurrency market. Its CEO, Abigail P. Johnson, has been a supporter of digital assets. In May 2017, Abigail P. Johnson revealed for the first time that as early as 2013, the company began researching cryptocurrencies in its blockchain incubator. Encrypted mining has also been tried and is working with the digital currency exchange Coinbase to allow customers to view their encrypted balances on the Fidelity website.

In October 2018, Fidelity announced the launch of its new subsidiary, Fidelity Digital Asset Services LLC, for the trading and storage of digital assets such as Bitcoin, and said it will initially offer Bitcoin and Ethernet. The two largest cryptocurrency trading services.

On January 29, 2019, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, a subsidiary of Fidelity, announced that its cryptocurrency hosting service will be officially launched in March.

On March 8, 2019, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, a subsidiary of Fidelity, announced that its Bitcoin hosting service has been launched to the "Selected Qualified Customer Group." Its solutions focus on the needs of hedge funds, family funds, pensions, endowments and other institutional investors.

On May 6, 2019, Bloomberg quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Fidelity Digital Assets, a subsidiary of Fidelity Group, will launch bitcoin trading services in recent weeks, which will face institutional investors rather than retail investors.

On July 20, 2019, according to a person familiar with the matter, Fidelity Digital Assets has formally applied for a trust license from the New York Financial Services Department (NYDFS). If the application is successful, FDAS can add New York to a few states (regions) where it currently operates its digital asset custody business.

On October 19, 2019, Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson said in an interview that Fidelity is expanding its cryptocurrency custody business, hoping to profit from the large regulated institutions in the digital asset world. He believes that "the people in the encryption field have a lot of cryptocurrency wealth, they are looking for someone to hold these tokens for them, because once they die, there must be a plan to be able to sell these tokens to others. ”

On November 20, 2019, Fidelity Digital Assets officially obtained the New York State Trust License.

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