Fidelity to delay Ethereum support after hard fork

Tom Jessop, the president of Fidelity Digital Assets (FDAS), said that the platform will delay adding support for Ethereum. According to him, the digital asset trading and custody branch of Fidelity Investments has developed a framework for evaluating cryptocurrencies:

“We’re currently supporting bitcoin, we have designs to support other coins over the balance of the year center to various criteria including our [in-house selection framework], where we obviously look … at client demand and other things.”

This selection framework looks at the coin’s decentralization, client demand, etc. They are also looking into market capitalization as it is closely related to client demand. However, the process isn’t that straightforward. Jessop gives the example of Ethereum to explain why:

“We will probably go in market cap order, that’s where the demand is but it doesn’t mean that we will list every coin. There may be reasons why we [won’t list] a coin that have nothing to do with quite frankly client [demand].......We’d love to have support [for] ether but you know you have a hard fork coming up and some upgrades, so I think we’re trying to see how those things work out before we make a decision to put them on the platform.”