A bomb was dropped out of nowhere yesterday afternoon at Bloomberg's Institutional Crypto event in NYC as Fidelity's Tom Jessup announced the launch of Fidelity Digital Assets, an investing and custody solution for institutional clients. This is HUGE news for the corn. This is the custody solution we've been waiting for. I've said it many times in this rag and on TFTC, custody of Bitcoin has been the biggest hurdle for the traditional financial institutions to overcome up to this point. When you're dealing with as much money as these institutions are, security of the assets in custody is imperative and no one in the market has stepped up to offer these services until now.

Fidelity has been one of the shining beacons of hope from the traditional financial system when it comes to Bitcoin. They've been on the beat for over four years experimenting with mining, encouraging their employees to use Bitcoin in the cafeteria to buy things (they discovered long confirmation times aren't conducive for buying coffee), and exhibiting extreme restraint as they obviously did not fall prey to the shallow world of "private blockchains" and full-blown shitcoinery. On top of this, in one of their first blog posts, they pay homage to the innovators who came before Satoshi and paved the path en route to Bitcoin being created. This is a great sign IMO, as it shows that the investing juggernaut understands Bitcoin's place in the context of the digital cash/money revolution. It seems as though they want to be true to the ethos of this revolution as well. Time will tell.

As for how I see this affecting markets, I don't think it will have an immediate effect as they are slowly rolling out their services to a small group of clients initially and will expand to a bigger client base in 2019. However, once the floodgates have truly been opened, I expect institutions and large investors to slowly get comfortable with their offerings over time. If Fidelity is able to follow up on their promises and offers an impeccable user experience to complement their custodial services, I believe this will be the most important on-ramp for the next bull run. Bull runs are usually preceded by new on-ramps being launched and adopted, and we have never seen an on-ramp like the one Fidelity is rolling out. Once sentiment turns and the charts begin to revert course, this ramp may be servicing more traffic than we have ever witnessed up to this point in Bitcoin's life.

Slowly but surely...

This is cool...

Someone just won 310BTC (~$2M) for solving a puzzle. Damn, I wish I was smarter. For those of you freaks who are good at puzzles, especially the type of this caliber, I highly recommend you keep an eye out for the artists launching these BTC hunts because they can be very lucrative. A pretty cool way to get BTC if you're smart but poor.

Final thought...

I don't mind being a procrastinator. Sort of like it actually.