Description
Fidelity Digital Assets is a dedicated digital asset business from Fidelity Investments®, offering institutional investors a fully integrated custody and trading platform. Launched in 2019, it brings over 75 years of traditional finance expertise to the digital assets ecosystem.
Key Capabilities
- Secure Custody — Digital assets are stored in offline, cold-vaulted storage with multi-tiered approval structures and multi-site storage, backed by robust physical, cyber, and operational controls.
- Execution & Trading — Access multi-venue liquidity through smart order routing and execute trades without moving assets from cold storage, with 23/7 trading and real-time settlement.
- Stablecoin — Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), an institutional-grade stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar.
- Integrated Solutions — Collateral accounts, Fidelity Crypto for Wealth Managers, and consolidated reporting through Wealthscape.
Who It Serves
Fidelity Digital Assets serves RIAs, family offices, corporate treasurers, pensions, endowments, hedge funds, asset managers, banks, broker-dealers, and miners.
Trust & Compliance
The platform undergoes SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 audits annually. Fidelity Digital Assets, National Association holds a national trust bank charter from the OCC (2025) and is registered with the UK FCA for certain cryptoasset activities.
Highlights
Pros
- Provides $100M+ institutional insurance program explicitly covering Bitcoin and Ethereum holdings in cold storage, with policy terms validated by independent auditors.
- Holds a national trust bank charter from the OCC (conditionally approved December 2025), providing regulated fiduciary-grade custody with bankruptcy-remote protections.
- Enables trading directly from segregated cold storage via multi-venue smart order routing without moving assets out of offline vaults, maintaining security and liquidity simultaneously.
- Backed by Fidelity Investments with 75+ years of traditional finance expertise, bringing unparalleled institutional credibility to digital asset custody.
- Offers 23/7 trading with real-time settlement and a dedicated 24/7 institutional service team, supporting time-sensitive treasury operations across time zones.
- Undergoes annual SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 audits, providing independent third-party verification of operational controls, key management, and disaster recovery procedures.
Cons
- Supports only Bitcoin and Ethereum for custody, significantly fewer digital assets than competitors such as BitGo (700+ assets) and Coinbase Custody (470+ assets).
- Commercial transparency is low — pricing, fee schedules, insurance limits, and service-level specifics are not publicly disclosed and require direct sales engagement to obtain.
- Independent review volume from third-party sources is very small, providing limited user-satisfaction data for procurement due diligence compared to mainstream institutional vendors.
- International regulatory coverage is narrower than globally specialized custodians, with licensing mainly limited to the US (OCC trust charter) and UK (FCA registration).
- Public API documentation and third-party integration details are limited, making self-serve technical evaluation difficult for institutional treasury and accounting teams.
- Does not offer native ETH staking capabilities, limiting yield-generation opportunities for institutional holders of Ethereum compared to competitors like Coinbase Custody and BitGo.