Coinedict reported yesterday that Goldman Sachs had ditched its plans of opening a desk to trade cryptocurrencies. Since the news broke, crypto markets plummeted which led to many individuals in the industry to be concerned about institutions losing interest in cryptocurrencies.
In a CNBC interview, Mitch Steves, the CEO of multinational investment firm Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), shed some light upon the concerns many had since Goldman Sachs observed a change of heart. Steves highlighted that Goldman-Sachs in particular was struggling to to procure institutional investment.
Steves mentioned, “So I don’t think [Goldman’s move] is a really big concern. First of all, the institutional investors that I speak with — that have been involved in the past five years or so — are still involved in this space and are tracking it very closely.”
Steves also made a comment on Goldman Sachs’s entanglement with Circle, pointing out the the product has its sights aimed at retail traders and not at institutions. He added, “Specifically, Goldman Sachs is invested in Circle, which is essentially a competitor to Coinbase. So they are already able to get trading flows from the retail side, but the institutional side is very difficult. And what I think they are realizing now is probably that the next step to get institutional money would be for a Bitcoin ETF to be approved.”
In the past Mitch Steves famously claimed that the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry was set to achieve a $10 trillion valuation. The host CNBC, Mellisa Lee, questioned Steves about his previously held belief and wondered when his prediction would yield the expected result to which Steve responded by saying, “Again, I’ll make the same call I made earlier. You can’t really look at this from a year-to-year basis… because it’s like a venture capital investment where you are looking at 10 to 15 years… If we look at it from a technical perspective, everything is still tracking ahead of plan.”
