Cryptocurrencies are of great appeal to a lot of consumers and corporations. In particular, firms in the financial sector want to enter this market sooner rather than later. Northern Trust, a famous financial services giant, is looking to expand its blockchain and cryptocurrency presence.
Northern Trust Makes a Strategic Move
There has been increasing interest by financial service providers in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. In the case of The Northern Trust Company, its focus lies on entering the cryptocurrency hedge fund space in the coming months. It is an interesting development, although it’s one that doesn’t come as a complete surprise.
Various companies have entered the cryptocurrency hedge fund space in the past few months. Several hundred such offerings exist today. Most of them are not linked to a major bank or financial service provider. With Northern Trust openly exploring these new markets, it is evident the financial sector is warming up to Bitcoin and altcoins.
It is not the first time Northern Trust has made somewhat of a surprising decision. Over the past few weeks, the company has shown increasing interest in adding blockchain features to its private equity workflow. Several fund administration services can now be accessed by various hedge funds which involve Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Northern Trust’s president of corporate and institutional services, Pete Cherecwich, noted:
You can take anything today. You can take movie rights, you can take all sorts of entities, and you can create a token for those. We have to be able to figure out how to hold those tokens, value those tokens, do those things.
Diversification of one’s investment portfolio is always a good idea. Cryptocurrencies provide a powerful and appealing option in this regard, despite the current price volatility. Addressing those problems will not be easy, mainly because the lack of regulation makes it very easy for markets to feature odd movements and potential manipulation. From a long-term perspective, however, Bitcoin and altcoins are always worth investing in.
With more and more firms paying attention to cryptocurrrency, a lot of interesting things are bound to happen. All of this exposure to cryptocurrency has to pay off at some point, even though the current market sentiment tells a completely different story. Short-term changes should always be taken with a few grains of salt, mainly because they only tell part of the overarching story.
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