Fidelity Goes Live With Crypto Custodial Solution For Select Clients

Fidelity Digital Assets is now live with its cryptocurrency custodial solution and will provide it to “a select group of eligible clients” as the firm is working towards becoming a go-to service provider for institutional investors in the world of cryptographic and blockchain-based finance.

Announcing the roll-out on Twitter, the digital asset solution branch of Fidelity investments would say that their focus is on serving the needs of "hedge funds, family offices, pensions, endowments, other institutional investors."

The firm first announced they would be rolling out the services to selected clients in late January, stating they've "established a robust set of technical and operational standards at a level that institutions have come to expect from Fidelity."

Along with custody, the Fidelity branch will also allow for digital asset trading.

At the moment it appears the firm is only providing support for Bitcoin while it remains in the process of evaluating other cryptocurrencies that may be added in the future.

“We’re currently supporting bitcoin, we have designs to support other coins over the balance of the year center to various criteria including our (in-house selection framework), where we obviously look at client demand and other things,” FDAS president Tom Jessop told CoinDesk on Thursday.

According to Jessop, client demand has correlated tightly with market capitalization.

“We will probably go in market cap order, that’s where the demand is but it doesn’t mean that we will list every coin,” he said. “There may be reasons why we [won’t list] a coin that have nothing to do with quite frankly client [demand].

Ethereum is one currency FDAS is looking at but is being patient with to see how future upgrades play out.

“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," Jessop would say.

Fidelity Digital Assets is looking to expand the number of clients it serves and wants to expand the scope for offering trading execution services throughout 2019.