Fidelity CEO Says Bear Market Is The Time To Go 'Extra Hard' Into Crypto

Fidelity Investments CEO and Chairman Abigail Johnson is unfazed by the downturn in the cryptocurrency market, reported CoinDesk on Thursday.

What Happened: Speaking at Consensus 2022, Johnson revealed that the current bear market is her “third crypto winter.”

“There’s been plenty of ups and downs but I see that as an opportunity."

“I was raised to be a contrarian thinker, and so I have this knee-jerk reaction: if you believe that the fundamentals of a long-term case are really strong when everybody else is dipping [out], that’s the time to double down and go extra hard into it," she said.

See Also: HOW TO BUY BITCOIN (BTC)

Johnson’s fascination with Bitcoin BTC/USD dates back to 2014 when she got into mining the digital asset — which brought about confusion from Fidelity’s finance department.

“People said ‘What is this? You want to buy a bunch of boxes from China?'" Johnson recalled people reacting to her plan to buy $200,000 worth of Bitcoin mining equipment.

Over the last few years, Fidelity has increased its focus on bringing cryptocurrency products to the market. Despite recent regulatory hurdles, Fidelity successfully launched the Fidelity Metaverse ETF FMET and the Fidelity Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF FDIG in April and is offering investors an option to put Bitcoin in their 401(k) retirement savings account.

“I would have never thought that we would have gotten so much attention for bringing a little bit of bitcoin to a little bit of the 401(k) business,” said Johnson.

 “I’ve been happily surprised at the amount of positive feedback that we’ve gotten on that.”

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, Bitcoin was trading at $30,361 at press time, down 0.19% over the last 24 hours.