Ethereum’s regular network upgrades could see it overlooked by investment vehicles that sought network stability as one of the major determinants in supporting a digital asset.
Tom Jessop, the head of Fidelity Investments’ digital assets arm the Fidelity Digital Assets Services (FDAS) recently uttered these sentiments in an interview with CNBC’s Kate Rooney during the DC blockchain summit that concluded on Thursday, March 7th.
Jessop revealed that FDAS has been in operation over the past few weeks as anticipated despite missing any official announcement. According to Jessop, the service launched to a select group of clients in test phase waiting to launch to the general public.
Jessop also confirmed that the service has launched with Bitcoin support with other assets soon to be supported.
“We’re currently supporting bitcoin, we have designs to support other coins over the balance of the year center to various criteria including our [in-house selection framework], where we obviously look … at client demand and other things,” he said on Thursday.
Ethereum’s ether is definitely another asset on the list of future additions owing to the above-stated factors of consideration. It has the client interest and is second in network value to Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization.
However, its constant upgrades (with two of these expected this year) could mean that FDAS could overlook it for now as they observe its stability after these upgrades.
He said: “We’d love to have support [for] ether but you know you have a hard fork coming up and some upgrades, so I think we’re trying to see how those things work out before we make a decision to put them on the platform.”
Ethereum recently hard forked implementing the much anticipated Constantinople upgrade on February 28th, however, this code upgrade was just a stop-over to the long-promised Serenity hard fork (or Ethereum 2.0).
Upcoming this October is yet another hard fork dubbed Istanbul before the last Serenity hard fork. As mentioned by Jessop, these upgrades, despite their obvious benefits to the Ethereum blockchain, mean that Ethereum code base is constantly evolving and will be hard to base a regulated product such as the FDAS products on an unstable codebase.
