Investment Giant Planning Crypto Exchange – Reports
US-based investment management giant Fidelity Investments is believed to be working on setting up a cryptocurrency exchange on its own, according to several media reports.
Fidelity, which is already known as crypto friendly for allowing their clients to hold bitcoin in their accounts through a partnership with the Coinbase exchange, is currently hiring engineers “to help engineer, create and deploy a Digital Asset exchange to both a public and private cloud,” according to a report by Business Insider.
The move comes after the veteran investment bank Goldman Sachs on May 2 finally admitted publicly that “bitcoin is not a fraud,” and announced plans to launch a bitcoin trading operation.
While Goldman Sachs has been a sharp critic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, Fidelity has maintained a much more positive view, and the company’s CEO Abigail Johnson is known as a long-time supporter of bitcoin.
During the Consensus 2017 conference in New York, Johnson told attendees “I love this stuff – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain technology – and what the future holds!”
No official statement has been issued by the company regarding the rumored new crypto exchange.
Meanwhile, Yo Kwon, CEO of blockchain cybersecurity firm Hosho, warned about the risks associated with setting up a crypto exchange.
“Fidelity will potentially introduce a large number of users onto its exchange, which by extension, means a large amount of assets being moved around. Fidelity could expose themselves as a hacker bait — the greater the bait, the more motivated hackers will be to get inside,” Kwon said.
