Fidelity is one of world’s largest investment firms and has more than $2.3 trillion in managed assets. According to Quartz, Fidelity has set up a small cryptocurrency operation inside its asset management department; this department is related to making money for the company. The firm has been testing with Bitcoin for quite some time now and its CEO, Abigail Johnson, vehemently supported Bitcoin in the Bitcoin-themed conference, Consensus, which was held in New York. At Consensus, she told the audience that her company has made several investments in Bitcoin-related businesses and is looking into the applications of blockchain technologies with correspondence of several leading universities. Moreover, a Financial time’s reported stated that Johnson is a huge fan of cryptocurrency and has mined more than 200,000 Satoshis.
At the Consensus Conference, Johnson further explained about the success of Fidelity's cryptocurrency mining:
“We set up a small Bitcoin and Ethereum mining operation…that miraculously now is actually making a lot of money."
The Financial Time’s reported that Fidelity bought their mining hardware from the now-pivoted 21 Inc, which is a mining company in the cryptocurrency industry. The firm has extended its compatibility with cryptocurrency and has made the balance of cryptocurrency visible on their sites for customers who hold an account with Coinbase. Coinbase is one of the largest trading and storage service providers for the cryptocurrency industry.
Bitcoin has soared back to $4,200 after facing severe drop when the Chinese authorities cracked down on IPOs and local trading of Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency market seems to be stubborn and is able to deal with such blows due to one of its most important features - flexibility to operate from anywhere in the world.
This has been clearly evident in the recent occurrences. When the Chinese authorities cracked down on the cryptocurrency market, the market shifted to Japan and South Korea, which are some of the countries with favorable environment for the growth of bitcoin.
Coming back to Fidelity, it is one of the largest financial firms that has spoken out publicly regarding their cryptocurrency operations. Other banks and firms have started testing cryptocurrencies internally, which include Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain based protocols.
The market of cryptocurrency was further strengthened when the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, stated that cryptocurrencies were certainly “more than just a fad.” The post was originally published on techcrunch.