Regulators Clear Fidelity Investments to Become Canada’s First Institutional BTC Custodian

Regulators Clear Fidelity Investments to Become Canada’s First Institutional Bitcoin Custodian

The service will initially be restricted to institutions. However, Fidelity is also providing Bitcoin ETFs to accommodate the demands of individual investors.

Fidelity Clearing Canada has been given the go-ahead by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada to launch a BTC trading and custody platform. It will be a first-of-its-kind service in Canada for institutional investors such as pension funds, portfolio managers, and mutual funds.

Fidelity Investments also plans to accommodate retail investors

With its new regulatory filing for a Bitcoin exchange-traded funded and mutual fund, Fidelity plans to appeal to retail investors as well. The firm submitted the filing for a Bitcoin ETF earlier at the beginning of the week.

Fidelity Investments has approximately $4.2 trillion in managed assets worldwide as of September. Exchange-traded cryptocurrency products are also gaining traction. Over 40 such digital products are awaiting regulatory approval in the United States alone.

A regulated platform has been on-demand for quite a while

In a conversation with The Globe and Mail, Scott Mackenzie, president of Fidelity Clearing Canada, stated the following:

“Institutions are increasingly interested in investing in digital assets. They’ve been searching for a regulated dealer platform to get their hands on this market.”

The road to crypto adoption in Canada has not been as smooth as could be expected. QuadrigaCX, the country’s largest crypto exchange at the time, went bankrupt after Cotten’s unexpected and mysterious death two years earlier, resulting in the loss of access to cold wallets holding funds.

The same source indicates that Cotten alone had access to the wallet keys that would allow him to withdraw roughly $143 million in deposits owned by over 115,000 former QuadrigaCX customers. There is currently a Netflix documentary on the life and death of Cotten being filmed.