U.S. asset management firm Fidelity Investments has plans to launch its own stablecoin in the coming weeks through a separate subsidiary focused on digital assets, as per an official update given by the company.
Fidelity Investments was founded in 1946 and manages close to $6 trillion in assets in the U.S today.
The stablecoin will be made available to both retail and institutional investors.
Called the Fidelity Digital Dollar, the token will be issued by a subsidiary of Fidelity called Fidelity Digital Assets. The stablecoin will be called FIDD, and reserves backing the token will be managed by another subsidiary of Fidelity called Fidelity Management & Research Co, according to Bloomberg.
“At Fidelity, we have a long-standing belief in the transformative power of the digital assets ecosystem and have spent years researching and advocating for the benefits of stablecoins,” said Fidelity Digital Assets’ president Mike O Reilly in the official statement. “As a leading asset manager and a digital assets pioneer, Fidelity is uniquely positioned to provide investors with on-chain utility via a digital dollar.”
Fidelity is now one of multiple banks and financial firms on Wall Street that are developing a stablecoin of their own or seriously considering it, moving this class of digital asset from a mainstream offering by fintechs and crypto firms to an institutional one.
While there are no popularly used stablecoins offered by a U.S. bank, Wall Street firms, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup are exploring possible services and banking operations in which a stablecoin would be useful.
In the U.S. fintech sector, multiple startups have gone ahead and rolled out their own stablecoin, such as Klarna and PayPal.