Fidelity Digital Assets is planning to increase its staff by about 70%. This move is due to the growing demand for cryptocurrency services from institutional investors.
Fidelity Investments Inc. plans to add about 100 workers to its team. The recruitment is for jobs in the field of “technology” and “sales and relationship management” in Dublin, Boston and Salt Lake City.
Tom Jessop, president of Fidelity Digital Assets, says that the new employees will help the business develop new products and expand into cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin. He added, “Last year was a real breakthrough year for the space, given the interest in Bitcoin that accelerated when the pandemic started.”
Looking at the crypto market Bitcoin hit a record above $64,000 earlier this year. In the bull run, other cryptocurrencies including Ether also rose to all time highs. However, they all fell down to half of their dollar value in recent weeks.
Fidelity Digital Assets Plan
Fidelity Digital offers only custody, trading and other services for Bitcoin. Jessop also said that they have seen more interest in Ether, so they want to be ahead of that demand.
Fidelity Digital will also push to offer trading throughout most of the week. Crypto trades all day every day, unlike most financial markets, which close in the afternoon and on weekends. They want to be at a place where it’s full time for most of the week.
In the current market, mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance has risen significantly. This has brought investors into pouring funds to the startups and new ways of conducting traditional financial transactions.
Venture Capital Funds Investing in Blockchains
Venture capital funds have already committed more than $17 billion this year to blockchain based projects, according to data provider PitchBook. By far this amount has surpassed the value raised in any single year. It can be said that this amount is equal to the total amount raised in all the previous years combined. Firms raising money include Chainalysis, Blockdaemon, Coin Metrics, Paxos Trust Co., Alchemy and Digital Asset Holdings LLC.
Beyond holding and trading in Bitcoin, Fidelity Digital allows its institutional customers to pledge Bitcoin as collateral against cash loans in a partnership with blockchain startup BlockFi Inc.
According to Jessop, Institutional investor demands to get access to Bitcoin, Ether and other digital currencies are only rising. The first clients of Fidelity Digital tended to be family offices and hedge funds. Which is now expanding to retirement advisers and corporations that want to hold crypto as an asset class.
For a lot of institutions, bitcoin has been an entry point into the crypto market. It’s now really opening up a window on what else is going on in the space. A big shift is in the diversity of interest from new and existing customers.
