Despite being in a bear market, companies across the board have been focusing on expansion. In fact, institutions from the traditional financial spectrum have been testing the crypto waters by offering products to cater to the demand of market participants.
Take the case of Fidelity Investments, for instance. At the beginning of October, it announced the launch of an Ethereum Index Fund. Now, as reported today, it has further broadened its interest in the altcoin and declared the launch of ETH custody and trading services for its institutional clients.
Read More: Fidelity announces Ethereum custody for Institutional Clients
N26 bank launches Bitcoin, Ethereum trading
Now, in another development on Thursday, European digital bank N26 announced that it is launching a crypto trading service for its customers. Notably, Austria is set to be the first market for the said launch.
The Germany-based bank will make use of crypto exchange Bitpanda’s trading and custody platform to give bank’s customers access to crypto. The service, called N26 Crypto, is set to become available to the bank′s Austrian clients in the coming weeks and it will initially include 100 tokens including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and XRP among others.
N26 plans to roll out the feature to users in other markets over the next six months and eventually expand its token offering to include a total of 194 tokens.
Talking to CNBC—Gilles BianRosa—N26′s Chief Product Officer, said that the bank’s crypto brokerage feature allows users to “dip their toes into the water in a way that’s not frothy.”
With respect to user interest in crypto, BianRosa said,
“Our users are extremely interested in crypto. That interest remains super high, even in a bear market.”
Top cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum have lost more than half their value over the past few months. This, however, did not stop the bank from launching its service at an even better time. Elaborating on the same, the executive said,
“We want to take a pretty long-term view around this. It’s not like we’re trying to time the launch on how the market is doing.”