Fidelity Investments, a fintech giant and major institutional player, has been gradually increasing its influence in the crypto community, not only by developing its own proprietary trading and custodial services for cryptos, but also by investing in various development efforts involving crypto related companies. The latest participation involves a startup by the name of Coin Metrics, a cryptocurrency data provider firm.
Coin Metrics announced recently that it had raised $1.9 million through various entities, including Fidelity Investments, Castle Island Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Dragonfly Capital. Tim Rice, a former Thomas Reuters executive, was appointed CEO and will be co-founder along with Nic Carter and Aleksei Nokhrin, who originally founded the enterprise in 2017 to be “an open source blockchain data and analytics project to help equip people and investors with the required data and tools related to crypto assets.”
Tim Rice noted that: “All of our investors are bought into the idea that the next phase of crypto asset investing requires robust comprehensive data and infrastructure. Having this premier group as investors is a great vote of confidence. We are building a world-class data company from the ground up to ensure the type of support and quality that top tier funds and asset managers expect. Coin Metrics is leveraging its groundbreaking work in on-chain network data by deploying the same rigor to exchange market data supported by a state-of-the-art data collection and delivery infrastructure.”
Fidelity tweeted the following message: “Pleased to support the efforts of data providers, such as @coinmetrics, whose work is critical to the growth of this community.”
Rice added: “We are evolving from an open-source community-based project. We view the next iteration for Coin Metrics is building and advancing our data for institutions.”
The firm is dedicated to analyzing cryptocurrency data, as well as details contained on the blockchain in order to provide traders with value-added information that cuts through the noise. Nic Carter went on to explain: “One thing we’re looking at is building out whitelists of exchanges so that the market reference rates are actually based on credible exchanges, as opposed to exchanges that engage in wash trading and other types of nonsense.”
Carter went on to say: “We basically built an Excel-like charting tool that lets your run statistical analysis on charts from your browser directly… There’s a commercial aspect to it now, but that open source, cypherpunk ethos will definitely remain.”
Fidelity Investments, the world’s largest administrator of personal assets, has been making many moves in the crypto space since 2015. It is already an investment lead in the ErisX exchange development, and it announced in late 2018 that it would soon launch a cryptocurrency custody and trading platform. Its Fidelity Digital Asset Services offering is set to start in March of this year. Fidelity Investments, a giant financial institution with more than 27 million customers and over $7.2 trillion in managed assets, is slowly paving the way for broader crypto awareness and acceptance amongst the public and large institutional investors.