With more than 35 million clients, $ 21 billion in revenue and $ 3.8 trillion in discretionary managed assets, Fidelity Investments is one of the largest investment management companies in the world. It may take all your weight to break the losing streak of crypto fund sponsors who have taken on the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC.
preliminary registration statement
As reported, Fidelity filed with the SEC on March 24 a preliminary registration statement on behalf of its Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust, an exchange-traded fund, ETF, that would track Bitcoin’s performance as measured by its Fidelity. Bitcoin Index. This followed similar requests from the SEC this year from WisdomTree, CBOE / VanEck, NYDIG Asset Management, Valkyrie Digital Assets, and SkyBridge Capital.
A Fidelity Bitcoin fund would be an event of some historical significance. According to Nik Bhatia, author of the book Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies and an adjunct professor of finance and business economics at the University of Southern California, this would be bigger than Elon Musk’s purchase of $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin (BTC) for Tesla’s corporate treasury (NASDAQ: TSLA), more significant than the fact that PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) allows its users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies, and greater than the next Coinbase IPO.
“It would bring the final stamp of legitimacy to Bitcoin,” Bhatia told Cointelegraph, and it could happen relatively soon. “I imagine [CEO] Abby Johnson and Fidelity have submitted the application, knowing they will approve it, and now I think it is probably less than 12 months away.”
Nigel Green, founder and CEO of the deVere Group – an independent financial advisory organization – told Cointelegraph, that if the SEC approves Fidelity’s BTC plans, it would mean “another big step into the mainstream world for cryptocurrencies. Also, inevitably. , will propel more institutional investors toward the already burgeoning cryptoverse. “
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However, not everyone is sure. “The Fidelity name is important, but it may not be big enough to overcome the other hurdles,” Georges Ugeux, associate professor of law at Columbia University School of Law, told Cointelegraph. Among those obstacles are the lack of diversification of cryptocurrency funds, illiquidity and, at least in the short term, the fact that the agency does not yet have a confirmed president.
