Fidelity Investment’s ETF Security Breach: Customer Data at Risk

In the past few weeks, the ETF by Fidelity Investment has attracted millions in inflows making it third most prominent among all trading ETFs. Most recently the ETF provider said that it has faced a breach affecting the information of over 77k customers. 

The breach incident came into the spotlight when Fidelity filed with the Office of Maine Attorney General on October 09 information that 51.5 million of its customer data of 77,099 users had been impacted. 

The filed complaint notes that a bad actor gains access to customers’ personal information including their names and other information. It is worth noting that this information breach was carried out by two customer accounts that were recently made. 

Fidelity 1st recognized unauthorized access on August 19; further dismantling it to avoid severe consequences. The giant assets manager with over $4.9 trillion in AUM (assets under management) said that it got help from “external security experts” to overcome the malicious activity. 

In a letter, Fidelity notes that “[It is also] a good idea to remain vigilant for fraudulent activity or identity theft by regularly reviewing your statement.”

The letter reads that the third party did not gain access to the accounts of Fidelity. Recently occurred data breach is termed to be the fourth breach in the past 12 months. 

FBTC Performance Updates 

The Bitcoin Fund by Fidelity holds 178.33k Bitcoins with a total net inflow of $9.87 Billion and FBTC has a trading price of $52.15 losing $1.13 in the past 24 hours. 

According to the data from Coinank, as of October 10, 2024, FBTC saw a net inflow of negative $33.80 million; with a volume of 3.31 million. It added 3467 Bitcoins in the past seven days and has a market capitalization of $10.60 billion and $9.90 billion in AUM. 

In terms of price, FBTC is the seventh cheapest Bitcoin ETF in the market and it charges around 0.25% as fees. The list of trading volume is led by IBIT the Bitcoin spot ETF by BlackRock followed by FBTC in second position followed by GBTC and others. 

With $17.24 billion in AUM IBIT tops the list followed by GBTC with $13.14 billion in AUM and FBCT is ranked third in this list. The vast Bitcoin spot market has a market capitalization of $53.32 billion and the total AUM is $40.10 billion. 

While the FETH, the Ethereum spot ETF by Fidelity saw an outflow of $3.54 million as of October 10, 2024. The Ethereum Fund by the asset manager has $349.49M in AUM and is priced at $23.64 losing 2.23% of its price in the past 24 hours. 

Fidelity Ethereum Fund holds 8.35 million ETH, however, the list is ruled by ETHE and ETHA which holds 47.35 million and 35.05 million. In the past few weeks, the highest positive net flow in FBTC was observed on September 27, 2024. 

Following the launch of the Bitcoin spot ETF, it gathered significant traction attracting billions of dollars; but market experts believe that the Ethereum spot ETF isn’t performing as expected.