Fidelity to trade crypto for institutional clients “within a few weeks”
As Originally Published on theblockcrypto.com
Fidelity, the massive Wall Street brokerage firm, is gearing up to trade crypto on behalf of its large institutional clients “within a few weeks,” according to a report by Bloomberg.
Readers might recall that Fidelity’s custody business for bitcoin has been up-and-running for the past couple of months. Now the firm will help those same clients trade in the nascent digital currency market — a service the firm has planned to offer since it announced its Fidelity Digital Assets business in October 2018.
Fidelity Digital Assets head Tom Jessop painted a picture of the firm’s trading business, which will not be open to retail clientele, in an interview with The Block.
“We are not prop trading, we don’t have a desk,” he said, noting that the firm would act as an agent for clients. “We are purely acting as effectively an agent, and that’s what our clients want. Our clients want to avoid the issues associated with funding on multiple exchanges, both administrative risk, or otherwise, they want something resembling the best price experience, and so we’ll try to do that by bringing liquidity providers, and other sources of liquidity onto our platform. I think effectively a smart order router, or logic, that would interrogate the market, find the best better offer, and allow the client to execute at that price.”
