Fidelity Targets Institutional Investors with Digital Assets Analytics Solution

Fidelity announced today that it has launched Sherlock, a digital assets analytics solution geared towards fund managers and other institutional investors.

“It’s been exciting to see the tremendous growth in the digital assets data space over the past few years, and while the market is maturing rapidly, we’ve heard from institutional investors that there’s still a need for a comprehensive and accessible data solution,” said Kevin Vora a VP of Product Management at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), its development house. 

Similar to a Bloomberg terminal, Sherlock brings together a plethora of siloed data sources such as analytics on ecosystem data, blockchain data, market data, sentiment analysis of social media, and news into one platform.

“As a quantitative asset manager, we require rich data for making trading decisions, and Sherlock goes above and beyond in delivering that,” said Junaid Ghauri, CIO and co-founder, Pareto Technologies. “We’ve found the development data provided by Sherlock to be among the core differentiators from comparable platforms.”

Fidelity’s Sherlock isn’t the only platform in this category on the market. Former CoinDesk managing director Ryan Selkis launched institutional-investor geared Messari in 2018. 

Data quality on current retail data repositories like CoinMarketCap is known to be an issue, which is why institutional investors likely are steering clear and prefer tools like Messari or Sherlock. In March 2019, CoinMarketCap admitted that concerns over the quality of the data on its platform are “valid” and when Binance purchased the site in 2020 there were promises to address this. 

A mid-2019 report from CoinDesk showed that there are a number of firms openly advertising that they will manipulate trading data for certain digital assets enhancing their placement on CoinMarketCap.