Betterment Partners With Gemini to Offer Crypto Portfolios

investopedia.com:

Investment robo-advisor Betterment partnered with crypto exchange Gemini to launch a crypto investing portfolio service for its 730,000 customers.

The partnership will give Betterment's customers access to customized crypto investment plans based on their risk profiles and interests. The digital assets will come from Gemini's platform. The exchange has a comparatively stringent process for listing tokens.

Officials from Betterment have said that the option is meant to foster a long-term focus when it comes to crypto investment, as “the burden of asset selection and the management of those assets” is removed from clients. The firm's idea is to give clients easy access to crypto investments, with fewer of the risks associated with crypto.

Betterment is a robo-advisor that offers its users several products to help with their investing. One of the platform's key features is the personalization of investments. To extend this to clients' crypto investments, Betterment acquired crypto robo-advisor startup Makara in February 2022.

The latest partnership is also yet another move by Gemini that focuses on working with established financial firms. The exchange, which is known for prioritizing compliance, in 2021 launched a crypto rewards card in partnership with Mastercard and in that year also joined with Australian fund manager Holon Global Investments to raise funds to buy Filecoin, the world’s largest decentralized storage network.

The partnership between Gemini and Betterment is just one of many that show that mainstream legacy finance institutions have an interest in the crypto market. For example, Fidelity, the largest 401(k) management firm, announced earlier in 2022 that it would allow investors to diversify their 401(k)