Abigail Johnson of Fidelity Reaffirms Crypto Commitment in Bear Market

• “This is my third crypto winter,” the CEO of a U.S. brokerage stated at Consensus 2022, reflecting on the firm’s pioneering path into digital assets.
• Fidelity, attracted by this “clean-slate approach to finance and moving wealth,” Johnson remembered, came up with “about 52 use cases” for Bitcoin.

Fidelity Investments chairman and CEO Abigail Johnson told the attendees at Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas, that her conviction in the long-term fundamentals of bitcoin remained high.

“I figure this is my third crypto winter. There’s been plenty of ups and downs but I see that as an opportunity,” Johnson said of the bear market. “I was raised to be a contrarian thinker and so I have this knee jerk reaction: If you believe that the fundamentals of a long term case are really strong, when everybody else is dipping [out], that’s the time to double down and go extra hard into it.”

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To be clear, Johnson was not optimistic about the recent severe correction. “I feel awful about the value that is lost, but I also believe the industry in crypto has a lot more to come,” Abigail Johnson said.

In October 2018, Fidelity, which Johnson’s grandfather created the year after World War II ended, established a distinct legal corporation named Fidelity Digital Assets. However, the Boston-based investment brokerage’s (and notably Johnson’s) participation in Bitcoin dates back to 2014, a journey she reminisced on in a fireside conversation with Castle Island Ventures founding partner Matt Walsh on Thursday afternoon.

Fidelity, attracted by this “clean-slate approach to finance and moving wealth,” Johnson remembered, came up with “about 52 use cases” for Bitcoin, the great majority of which became bogged in complexity and languished on the shelf.

Early on, the decision to focus on the technology’s core level drove Johnson’s team toward custody – but it was not one of the firm’s original use cases, she said, adding bluntly that she was not as far along on the product side of things as she had planned when the journey began.

“When we first started talking about it, I think if someone had suggested offering custody for bitcoin, I’d have said ‘no, that’s the antithesis of bitcoin. Why would anyone want to do that?’”

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Fidelity was one of the first significant institutional players to deal directly with crypto rather than dabbling with watered-down versions of blockchain technology, which was the popular option for corporations for a period. Walsh alluded to this distinction, quipping, “It’s not like you were trying to put lettuce on the blockchain.”