One of the biggest American multinational financial services corporations, Fidelity, just launched crypto trading for retail traders on its platform. While they just opened the waitlist, the feature is set to go live very soon. As per their announcement, retail traders will participate in zero-commission trading which will initially only include Bitcoin and Ethereum. For your information, Fidelity boasts more than $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM). This major development opens the door to more than 40 million individual investors to begin trading BTC and ETH through Fidelity.
Following their Twitter announcement, Fidelity Investments opened an early-access waitlist for retail traders. This will allow a certain amount of retail traders to start trading the two biggest cryptocurrencies on the platform. While there will be no fees associated with retail traders, Fidelity claims that it will collect 1% as a spread. For your information, the difference between the price of a cryptocurrency when the users buy or sell it and its price when the brokerage fills the order is called a spread. While Fidelity only accepts Bitcoin and Ethereum at the time, they are evaluating other cryptocurrencies as well. This might lead to more crypto trading options on the platform.
Crypto Retail Trading Prior to Fidelity
Trading cryptocurrencies in a regulated manner is not something new. People have been doing so since the day that Bitcoin got approved as an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), in 2021. To be more exact, retail traders were able to trade cryptocurrencies since the first cryptocurrency exchange made its debut. Until today, cryptocurrency exchanges have been the best place to trade cryptocurrencies for numerous reasons. The main reason, of course, is the fact that trading cryptocurrencies in such exchanges make it easy for you to maneuver around your wallet efficiently.
First, the fees in some exchanges are extremely low. Major cryptocurrency exchanges have near-zero fees when it comes to trading inside the platform. Binance, for example, has a maker/trader fee of 0.015%/0.030% per trade. Second, jumping from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency is extremely easy using cryptocurrency exchanges. Third, you can “cash out” immediately. Because today we have stablecoins in every crypto exchange, it is extremely easy to simply and securely “freeze” your funds until the next trading period. Through stablecoins, retail traders can safely take time off trading without being afraid of their portfolio decreasing in value. Understanding how volatile the crypto market is, stablecoins are extremely important for retail traders.