There has been a lot of exciting news in the bitcoin and crypto-currency space of late, including new highs for bitcoin, ethereum and most crypto-currencies. With all this exciting news, more financial companies are lining up to support crypto-currencies for themselves & their clients.
Fidelity Investments, one of the largest asset managers in the world with over $2.2 trillion in managed assets; is empowering their 26 million customers to be able to see their crypto-currency holdings along with their traditional holdings of bonds, stocks, etc (via Coinbase integration). Announced by Chief Executive Abigail Johnson on May 24, 2017, this move will make the Boston-based asset manager one of only a handful of large financial services firms to have integrated digital currencies into their client website.
Blockchain is a shared online ledger of transactions; this technology is leveraged by bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, which continues to attract new investments by well-established financial institutions looking to the technology to help them save money and time.
Other financial services firms blazing the trail in the crypto-currency space are Deloitte with their Rubix ATM, the ability to pay for lunch with bitcoin (using BitPay) at their cafeteria Bistro 1858 in Toronto, Canada
“I love this stuff – bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain technology – and what the future holds,” Chief Executive Abigail Johnson said at a blockchain conference called Consensus in New York City. Ethereum continues its meteoric rise in price & popularity; it uses a more advanced type of blockchain technology, which can build more complex applications not available with bitcoin.
Fidelity has also built proofs of concepts for accepting bitcoin micro-transactions and they have set up small bitcoin and ethereum mining operations as well in the “spirit of learning”.
Two key predictions made by Abigail Johnson, don’t expect bitcoin to overtake Visa anytime soon & don’t expect a faster settlement of financial transactions in the short term. That being said she was clear that asset managers still had faith in virtual currencies.
Many large financial firms are investing in crypto-currencies as they go mainsteam, the blockchain consortium R3, developing their own blockchain platform called Corda & raised a record $107 million from over 43 financial institutions, Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, UBS and HSBC among others. Corda is an open-source distributed ledger platform designed to record, manage and automate legal agreements between businesses.
At the recent Consensus Conference, Wences Casares, CEO of bitcoin wallet Xapo and a member of PayPal’s board of directors predicted that Bitcoin price will reach $1 million in the next 5-10 years.
We’ve come a long way since the first bitcoin transaction occurred for 2 pizzas costing 10,000 bitcoins. Users can now use crypto-currencies to pay for goods & services via their smartphone, wallet address (QR code) or via crypto-enabled debit/credit card.