“We've Actually Been Mining Since 2015” – Fidelity Let Slip

Well, it's amazing just how much can come out simply by accident. With the latest example being by Fidelity this week, Without anyone really taking notice of the large-scale implications involved.

For those otherwise unfamiliar, Fidelity is the world's fourth largest asset management company, with a grand total of $7.2 trillion in assets which it manages to some capacity. And it has recently announced that it has been directly involved in mining Bitcoin since 2015.

They have also disclosed that they have been taking a habit to closely watching the digital asset class for at least five years, possibly to find an advantageous time to begin. These disclosures began as ‘internal' communications, but has since resulted in the firm opening up an institutional custody and warehouse platform which will allow institutional firms to trade bitcoin and, it's assumed, other assets in the future (It remains unclear what specific assets they would take into consideration for trade, however.)

In the announcement, which landed the other day, resulting in an enormous splash in the cryptocurrency space, and the larger financial ecosystem as a whole, Fidelity made it clear that they aim to become a serious competitor to the likes of Bakkt, ErisX, Nasdaq, and others which are certain to follow in Fidelity's wake.

From yesterday:

“Fidelity Investments is spinning off a stand alone company dedicated exclusively to bringing cryptocurrencies to institutional investors.”

Called Fidelity Digital Assets, the limited liability corporation based in Boston will provide enterprise-grade custody solutions, a cryptocurrency trading execution platform and institutional advising services 24 hours a day, seven days a week designed to align with blockchain’s always-on trading cycle.”

Along with this, a passage that was eloquently snuck into a small paragraph across several articles, Tom Jessop let slip that Fidelity has been researching digital assets for at least five years, and that the company has been “…mining Bitcoin since 2015.”

This series of revelations brings up this one question: How much Bitcoin has Fidelity managed to mine over this span of time? And where are they keeping it all now? It makes for an interesting series of questions to answer.

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