Fidelity in Search of New York Trust License
Fidelity’s crypto-asset division, the fittingly-named Fidelity Digital Asset Services — FDAS for short — is purportedly in the midst of an application process for a Trust license in New York State.
Sources tell The Block, an industry publication, that the financial institution’s crypto team has made its application to the New York Department of Financial Services, which presides over some facets of the Gemini Trust — the Winklevoss Twins’ firm — and other startups that have operations in the state.
Should FDAS secure the license, it will be able to custody cryptocurrencies, in New York State.
For those unaware, the institution, which has thousands of institutional clients and assets under management literally worth trillions, launched FDAS late last year. It has since reportedly been testing and deploying a Bitcoin custodial solution to a handful of selected clients. As a side note, the company is also purportedly looking into a trade execution desk for Bitcoin. Combined, these two products, when launched at scale, could be two massive mediums of institutional Bitcoin adoption.
This comes as Fidelity has only ramped up its other efforts in the blockchain technology and crypto-asset space. Per previous reports from Ethereum World News, Financial News reports that someone familiar with the matter claims that Fidelity staff “across various parts of the international business” are actively looking into blockchain technologies. Also, Forbes has reported that the Wall Street giant has an internal crypto game, during which all of Fidelity’s 8,000 staff can build a portfolio of digital assets.
Chief executive Anne Richards, who has purportedly been mining Bitcoin for years in her own office, stated:
We have a bitcoin trading game that we use internally, as a way of teaching people about distributed ledger technology and digital tokenization, which ultimately will be an important part of the whole financial system going forward.
Institutions Are Flooding Into Crypto
Fidelity’s further foray into the Bitcoin market comes as institutions have also begun to continue to make an impact on the budding cryptocurrency industry.
Case in point, Grayscale’s latest Digital Asset Investment Report revealed that the firm. secured over $84.8 million in investment during the last quarter, marking the strongest inflows since the true start of the bear market in Q2 of 2018.
Per the report, much of the capital that Grayscale received in Q2 was allocated to its Bitcoin Trust, the firm’s flagship vehicle that trades on American over-the-counter markets. This may be one of the reasons why Bitcoin dominance has rallied in this uptrend, not declined as it did in early-2018. What’s also interesting is that a purported 84% of the $84.8 million inflow was sourced from institutional players, mainly “hedge funds”.
Per Changpeng “CZ” Zhao of Binance, however, the herd isn’t entirely here. As reported previously, he told Bloomberg that proportionally, institutions have just as much as of impact on Binance’s cryptocurrency market as they did last year.
Photo by Colton Duke on Unsplash
