Fidelity Investments, the asset management giant with over US$4.5tn in assets under management, intends to beef up its digital assets unit by 25% by the end of next year.
Having already doubled its workforce since May, the additional 100 team members will bring the Fidelity Digital Assets department’s headcount to 500.
Fidelity will have a considerable pool of talent to draw from- recent turmoil in the crypto markets has forced big hitters like Coinbase and Crypto.com to conduct mass layoffs, while a spate of high-profile executive resignations has plagued the industry.
Listed jobs run the gamut of compliance, custody operations, trading, risk management, engineering and management, including:
- Fidelity Digital Assets Analyst, Account Management operations
- Director, Digital Asset Investment Product
- Senior Compliance Manager - Digital Assets Compliance
- Director of Software Engineering, Wallet Blockchain
Unlike some of its traditional finance brethren (i.e. JPMorgan), Fidelity has been bullish on digital assets, having even allowed customers to include bitcoin in their 401(k) retirement plan portfolios.
No doubt, much of the beefed-up workforce will be focused on Fidelity’s new Ethereum trading and custody services due to launch on October 28.
“With the Ethereum Merge completed, many investors are looking at Ethereum through a new lens,” Fidelity Digital Assets said last week, when it confirmed that “investors will be able to buy, sell, and transfer ether, accessing the same operational excellence, robust security, and dedicated client service model provided for bitcoin investments today”.
These new products will undoubtedly require more hands on deck, but the hires also come at a time when asset management companies are making a push for cryptocurrency-based exchange-traded funds.
Regulator shoots down bitcoin ETFs
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US has consistently shot down any applications for bitcoin spot ETFs.
Fidelity’s own Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust ETF application never got the go ahead, nor did similar applications from Wilshire Phoenix and Grayscale Investments.
But pressure is mounting on the SEC, with thousands of investors and stakeholders petitioning the regulator to revise its position.
“We make the case that the SEC is arbitrarily treating spot Bitcoin ETFs differently from bitcoin futures ETFs even though they're subject to the same risks in that they're both based on the same underlying spot bitcoin markets,” Grayscale’s chief legal officer Craig Salm recently stated.
Salm reasoned that “at the end of the day, it isn't necessarily an issue about bitcoin. It's really about fair and equal treatment under the law”.
Although asset management firms continue to push for bitcoin spot ETFs, a spokesperson for Fidelity told Proactive that the team expansion is "not related to any anticipated regulatory change".