Why are institutions entering the crypto space? See these figures, announcements and news

For years, the crypto community has been saying "institutions are coming"... for a long time, we were all wrong. Now, in the depths of a bear market, it's becoming increasingly clear that institutions have indeed come.

First look at some data:

1) In a Fidelity survey of 1,052 institutional investors, 58% of them currently hold digital assets, and 74% plan to buy or invest in digital assets.

2) In a survey of 270 institutional investors by Bank of New York Mellon, 97% of investors believed that "tokenization will revolutionize asset management", and 88% of respondents said that despite the market downturn, they Still planning to advance the current digital asset calculation; 88% of respondents are willing to use stablecoins, 49% are willing to give up the overnight benefits of cash deposits, send domestic payments 24/7, 69% are willing to make cross-border payments and money transfer.

Investors say they could allocate an average of 29% of their portfolios to digital assets within 2-5 years if the regulatory environment is favorable and the necessary infrastructure is in place.

3) Coinbase’s third-quarter financial report shows : “As of the end of the quarter, about 25% of the world’s 100 largest hedge funds in terms of reported assets under management have chosen to cooperate with Coinbase.”

Major institutional announcements:

4) Bank of New York Mellon, the oldest bank in the United States, has launched BTC and ETH custody for institutional clients, offering it in partnership with Fireblocks.

5) The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced that it will publish market data on the Pyth Network - further cementing Pyth's potential impact on the multi-billion dollar market data business.

6) Google announced that it is running a Solana node and plans to offer a fully managed SOL node hosting service in 2023 (previously announced the launch of managed blockchain Ethereum nodes). Google is also indexing Solana data and adding it to the BigQuery data warehouse.

7) Kevin Bowers, Chief Scientist of Jump Crypto, gave a presentation at the Solana Breakpoint conference about Firedancer , the new Solana validator client that Jump is building.

8) The U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has updated the accounting rules for cryptocurrencies on corporate balance sheets, which is beneficial for more companies to hold cryptocurrencies.

9) Fidelity Digital Investment launched a commission-free encryption trading platform (Fidelity Crypto), retail investors can trade BTC and ETH through Fidelity.

NFT news from major platforms:

10) Reddit launched their "digital collection" (NFT) on Polygon, with over 3 million wallets created by Reddit users.

11) Instagram announced that it will allow users to mint and sell NFTs on the Polygon blockchain.

Facebook and Instagram then announced that they would allow users to connect web3 wallets and NFTs. Supported blockchains are Ethereum, Polygon, Flow and Solana (coming soon).

12) Apple now explicitly allows apps to list, mint, transfer, and view NFTs, which will increase the use of NFTs in the app experience. But there is also a downside, which is that Apple also includes NFT purchases in the 30% IAP (in-app payment) fee.

Big news about institutions and web3 games:

13) Korean game developer WeMade Games completed financing of US$46 million, and Microsoft invested US$14.8 million in it. Wemade says its goal is to "change the game of everyday life with blockchain technology".

14) Epic Games released the first web3-based game Blankos Block Party on the Epic Games Store