On Monday (September 12), billionaire investor Mike Novogratz said at the SALT New York 2022 conference that he had heard Fidelity Investments is planning to make crypto trading available to its retail customers.

Former hedge fund manager Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, “a technology-driven financial services and investment management firm that provides institutions and direct clients with a full suite of financial solutions spanning the digital assets ecosystem.”

On 15 October 2018, Fidelity Investments, which one of the world’s largest financial services providers with roughly $9.9 trillion in client assets (as of 30 June 2022), announced the launch of a new company, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, which would offer “enterprise-quality custody and trade execution services” for cryptocurrencies to institutional investors (such as “hedge funds, family offices and market intermediaries”).

Abigail P. Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments, had this to say about this new subsidiary back then:

“Our goal is to make digitally-native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors. We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.“

And Tom Jessop, President of Fidelity Digital Assets, stated:

“We started exploring blockchain and digital assets several years ago, and those efforts have been successful in helping us understand and advance our thinking around cryptocurrencies. The creation of Fidelity Digital Assets is the first step in a long-term vision to create a full-service enterprise-grade platform for digital assets.“

Then, on 26 April 2022, Fidelity Investments announced that it would allow investors to put Bitcoin ($BTC) into their 401(k) retirement savings accounts.

Well, according to a report published by Wall Street Journal (WSJ) yesterday, the Galaxy Digital CEO had this to say about Fidelity during a talk he gave at SALT New York 2022:

“A bird told me that Fidelity, a little bird in my ear, is going to shift their retail customers into crypto soon enough. I hope that bird is right. And so we are seeing this institutional march.”

The WSJ report also mentioned that — according to “people familiar with the matter” — Fidelity Investments is “weighing a plan to allow individual investors to trade bitcoin on its brokerage platform.” It is important to note that Fidelity has around 40 million individual investors.

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Featured Image via Pixabay