Financial services firm Fidelity Investments Inc. is the latest to enter the cryptocurrency market, launching a new service today that will handle cryptocurrency custody and trade execution for institutional investors.

Called Fidelity Digital Asset Services, the new service will offer institutional custody and trade execution services for digital assets. A custody service is where a brokerage or other financial institution. In this case, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, holds securities on behalf of the client to reduce the risk of the client losing assets or having them stolen.

The custody service is claimed to be secure, compliant and an “institutional-grade omnibus storage solution” for bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets with vaulted cold storage and multilevel physical and cybercontrols for added security.

While not saying which exchanges it will work with, Fidelity said its trade platform leverages a proven internal crossing engine and smart order router for execution of digital assets at multiple market venues.

“Our goal is to make digitally native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors,” Fidelity Chief Executive Officer Abigail P. Johnson said in a statement. “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.”

While several crypto custody services already exist, Fidelity’s entry into the market is a positive boost for cryptocurrency markets as a whole. As of last December, Fidelity is the world’s fourth-largest asset manager, with $7.2 trillion in assets under management.

Thate staggering amounts of assets under management is for institutional clients, meaning that coming into the new service, Fidelity already has a large and highly influential client base to sell the crypto service to.

“For many institutional investors, a trusted custodian like Fidelity entering the space removes a huge obstacle to investing in cryptoassets,” Hunter Horsley, chief executive officer of Bitwise Asset Management, told SiliconANGLE. “I think we’ll look back on 2018, and particularly this moment, as the time that crypto became cemented as a new asset class.”

Photo: Fidelity Jumper Classic/Wikimedia Commons