If you’ve been reading our posts lately, you’ll know that mass adoption groundwork is being slowly but surely implemented. Morgan Stanley. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. India. Want more proof? Fidelity will be offering cryptocurrency products. Fidelity Investments CEO Abigail Johnson has recently disclosed that the company is working on a number of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related products, with their release to the general public set sometime before the end of 2018.
Speaking on Friday at the Boston Fintech Week conference, she declined to go into any specifics regarding as to what exactly Fidelity is working on, will be offering, or releasing regarding the cryptocurrency/blockchain space. Investors and market participants (you! Follow us on facebook here) are likely to pay close attention to any further announcements from Fidelity regarding cryptocurrency and blockchain. Fidelity continues to build a reputation as one of the most crypto-positive large financial service firms in the world.
Speaking about Fidelity’s plans for moving into the cryptocurrency space, Johnson remarked: “We’ve got a few things underway, a few things that are partially done but also kind of on the shelf because it’s not really the right time. We hope to have some things to announce by the end of the year.”
The announcement should be welcomed with jubilance from the crypto markets, which continue to anticipate the entry of large institutional investment that simply hasn’t taken place yet. In a market with a total capitalization still below $300 billion despite a flurry of publicity and investment sentiment, Fidelity has consistently been one of the few large firms that has repeatedly and openly signaled its interest.
In June, it was rumored that Fidelity was working on a crypto exchange, and was actively seeking to hire a fund manager to run a new cryptocurrency fund. Unfortunately, neither of these rumors has been confirmed by the company.
After launching in 2015, the company’s public charity organization, Fidelity Charitable, raised nearly $6 million in crypto donations in only the first six months of 2017. According to Johnson, the success of Fidelity Charitable lay in the fact that it gave a new class of wealthy crypto entrepreneurs an easy way to become philanthropists.
Johnson also remarked that while the company is still exploring uses for crypto and blockchain technology, its goal is to place the needs of the market before the technology – a wise choice, given Fidelity’s mission goals as a financial services company!
She further clarified: “What we started with was building a long list of use cases for either Bitcoin, Ethereum, other cryptocurrencies, or potentially just raw blockchain technology. Most of them have been scrapped by now or at least put on the shelf. The things that actually survived were not the things I think necessarily we expected. We were trying to listen to the marketplace and anticipate what would make sense.”
Despite the growth of cryptocurrencies and digital currency, Abigail Johnson still believes that the company does not expected financial services to be completely taken over by electronic offerings such as cryptocurrency and blockchain in the future – ultimately, as a company, they will keep this in mind with future decisions.
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