Fidelity Investments, the much-celebrated institutional investment firm that has the crypto community excited with the possibility it might shake the market out of its bear phase, apparently has a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts among its top executives.
CCN reports that co-founder of BlockTower Capital, Ari Paul, revealed this information on Wednesday:
Fidelity’s cryptocurrency culture is bonkers. Literally hundreds of passionate advocates at every level of seniority at the firm. They have more people working on crypto than the 5 biggest crypto funds combined. Their approach to custody from a security perspective is very impressive (at least from my relatively quick look.) Not many groups actively mitigating things like HSM supply chain risk.
Fidelity has been taking the last two years or so to understand cryptocurrency and the technology that powers them.
This includes mining Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). The firm appears to be taking its time with its approach in the crypto space, preferring to lay a strong foundation for what appears to be a growing level of institutional investment.
Chief Operating Officer Hadley Stern told Fortune last year that the firm had been mining assets to get a better understanding of consensus mechanisms, difficulty levels and the networks in general. This is a level of diligence not shown by many other firms, which Paul makes a strong note of.
Reddit user ScienceGuy9489, well-known in crypto circles, posted the news of Fidelity’s Bitcoin enthusiasm on reddit, and also made a prediction that Ethereum’s price will surge on the very specific date of April 24 — which, not surprisingly, was very happily welcomed by the Ethereum community.
Though it has not been confirmed and officials have said that Ethereum support would arrive in due time, one wonders whether the price of the token will surge when Fidelity finally supports Ethereum.
Here too is their general approach one of caution, with president Tom Jessop — who holds an optimistic view about crypto in 2019 — saying:
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.
Whether or not the Ethereum’s price will break out anytime soon remains to be seen, as is the case with the crypto market in general.
However, several insiders have an optimistic outlook for the year, and 2019 could very well be a period in which we see a less hysteric and more permanent growth of the market.
