Abigail Johnson, chairman and chief executive officer of Fidelity Investments, was among the first … [+]
Fidelity president and director of digital funds Peter Jubber today filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) informing the regulator of a new fund dedicated to bitcoin.
The previously unknown Wise Origin Bitcoin Index Fund I, LP was incorporated this year and is being run from the same Boston headquarters where the investing giant manages $8.3 trillion in customer funds. The early documentation provides little in the way of details about the fund, and shows that zero investors have currently participated. We do know that the minimum investment to join the pooled investment fund is $100,000, indicating this is likely only for institutional and accredited investors.
However, to give an idea of how Fidelity might eventually use the newly revealed fund, the firm recently published the results of a survey of 800 institutional investors from the U.S. and Europe, finding that 36% of respondents were already invested in digital assets, while 60% said digital assets had a place in their portfolio.
This is the latest development at Fidelity, showing the seriousness with which it is taking bitcoin as an investable asset. A year after becoming one of the earliest institutional supporters of bitcoin in 2017, when Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson publicly said she’d been mining the asset, the company formalized its interest with the launch of Fidelity Digital Assets.
The following year, in 2019, the New York Department of Financial Services
While it remains unclear the relationship between Wise Origin Funds and Fidelity Digital Asset, Smithfield, Rhode Island-based Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC will serve as the fund’s custodian, according to the documents. A voice on Wise Origin’s answering machine identifies the organization as Wise Origin Funds. A trademark application for that name was filed by Fidelity intellectual property vice president Thomas Barry and is currently under review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
A separate Wise Origin fund for $560,000 was filed in January, but made no reference to bitcoin.