Fidelity Investments, One of the worlds largest and most diversified financial services providers, has announced the launch of a new company that will open services for cryptocurrencies.

Fidelity Investments currently holds more than $7,2 trillion in client assets and have more than 27 million customers. The company announced on October 15th the launch of the new company, Fidelity Digital Asset Services LLC. The company will offer enterprise-quality custody and trade execution services for digital assets, commonly referred to as cryptocurrencies, to sophisticated institutional investors such as hedge funds, family offices and market intermediaries and their goal is to make digital assets more accessible.

“Our goal is to make digitally-native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors,” said Abigail P. Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments. “We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.”

Even though the statement is news to the market, Fidelity has been in the space for a while. The head of the new company, Tom Jessop, said that the idea of commercialising a crypto company began in the middle of last year. Fidelity Digital Assets will start by offering services to institutions and hedge funds, some family offices but not to retail investors.

“We saw that there were certain things institutions needed that only a firm like Fidelity could provide,” Jessop told CNBC, adding that it already works with 13,000 institutional clients.

In addition to storing cryptocurrencies, Fidelity Digital Assets will use an existing internal crossing engine and smart order router for trade execution. This order router will allow Fidelity institutional customers to execute trades for bitcoin, ether and other assets at multiple market venues.

Interestingly Johnson, the CEO of Fidelity Investments, had an interest in cryptocurrencies back in 2014 and started with Bitcoin mining and are only increasing its services, now by creating a new company. Jessop said that the company is not distracted by price. He compared the technology’s long-term potential with moving financial services to the internet and believes that cryptocurrencies have huge long-term potential.

Fidelity is not the only major player that will offer custodial services. Many companies and institutions such as Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley are getting into the crypto space. Even the top 25 universities in the U.S. have invested in cryptocurrency funds, and Harvard has invested the most with an investment of $36 billion.

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