Bitcoin price update: Fidelity Investments begins offering a cash-for-Bitcoin service

Bitcoin remains well within range of beating its all-time high set in 2017.
Bitcoin was trading at $18,456 at the time of writing, slightly down on the 24-hour peak of $18,647. Today’s high represents a $915 gap from the day’s low of $17,732 providing ample volatility for micro traders.
Looking at Bitcoin’s performance over the week, the market has seen its spot value decrease over 5.8% shedding around $1,150. This is coming off a fresh run challenging all-time highs for Bitcoin which reached as high as $19,568 just this week. This is less than $500 shy of the Bitcoin all-time high set in December of 2017.
Other vital signs for Bitcoin are relatively stable or positive. Total Bitcoin transactions remain within the year’s average of around 300,000 transactions per day. The value of Bitcoin transactions over the month hasn’t changed unexpectedly. However, that figure of around $4.5 billion is a marked increase from the first half of the year which saw the value of Bitcoin transactions average at around $2 billion, suggesting stable transaction volume even as prices rise.
Bitcoin price movement over the past 24 hours.
Hedge fund Fidelity Investments continues building on its digital assets services
The fanfare for Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general continues to gather pace, as Fidelity Investments adds yet another Bitcoin product to its services.
Fidelity has partnered with BlockFi to offer cash-loans using Bitcoin as collateral. Essentially, holders of Bitcoin will be able to deposit the asset with Fidelity Investments and BlockFi will credit customers with cash-loans for 60% of face value.
According to its website, Fidelity Investments has a total discretionary asset value of $3.4 trillion. Since 2018 the wealth management behemoth has slowly been developing its digital assets service offering.
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The new service is aimed at opening credit accounts for Bitcoin investors, digital miners, over-the-counter trading desks as well as hedge funds according to Tom Jessop, President of Fidelity Digital Assets which is a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments.
This adds legitimacy to the growing asset class providing greater liquidity to the market in the form of high net worth draft accounts. Jessop supported this by saying that “as the markets grow, we’d expect that this becomes a fairly important part of the ecosystem”.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, keep your crypto safe with a hardware wallet and dive deeper with our simple guide to DeFi.
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