Although crypto remains in bearish territory, Fidelity remains bullish on the category. Over the next three to six months, the firm plans to hire 100 employees for its Digital Assets division, bringing its total to around 500 employees. Launched in 2018, this business unit offers custody and trading services for crypto investments.
Tupungato/Dreamstime
“Fidelity Digital Assets is in a unique position to offer exposure to the dynamic, emerging sector that is digital assets with the stability of a well-established and well-diversified company,” a Fidelity spokesperson said in an email to Barron’s Counsel.
Hiring for these positions may not be that difficult. Crypto firms like
Coin base
,
BlockFi, Genesis, OpenSea and Crypto.com have all announced layoffs in recent months.
On Fidelity’s careers page, there are 74 vacancies for digital assets. Of these, 14 are for technology roles such as software, testing and security engineers. The rest of the positions span categories such as risk management, product development, marketing, customer service and marketing.
Fidelity is an early adopter of crypto. Back in 2014, the firm started mining Bitcoin. Since then, Fidelity has rolled out several crypto funds, including the Ethereum Index Fund, which came out in early October.
Fidelity has also partnered with Citadel Securities,
Virtu Financial
and
Charles Schwab
to develop a cryptocurrency trading platform. The platform is expected to launch later this year or early 2023. There are even plans to offer Bitcoin options for 401(k)s plans.
For the year so far, Bitcoin is down about 58% and Ethereum has plunged 64%. While expanding into crypto now may seem counterintuitive to advisors, it makes perfect sense to people in the crypto investment world. Besides Fidelity, other traditional financial services firms, such as Visa, BNY Mellon and
MasterCard
,
continue to invest in blockchain and cryptocurrency technology.
“Decentralized infrastructure is here to stay,” said John Lo, managing partner of Digital Assets at Recharge Capital, a $6 billion multi-strategy investment firm. “At this point, institutions cannot ignore the production-grade improvements offered by blockchain systems on efficiency, transparency and robustness.”
Tom Taulli is a freelance writer, author and former broker. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, How to Create a Web3 Startup: A Guide for Tomorrow’s Breakout Companies.
