Coinedict reported on the 5th of September that Goldman Sachs was no longer pursuing a trading desk for cryptocurrencies and also reported yesterday about Mitch Steves’ take on the whole situation where he reiterated that institutional investors were still closely tracking developments in the cryptocurrency space.
CNBC has today published the news of Goldman Sachs’ Chief Financial Officer, Martin Chavez proclaiming, “I never thought I would hear myself use this term but I really have to describe that news as fake news”. According to the CFO, Goldman Sachs is actively pursuing the creation of a type of derivative for Bitcoin (BTC) owing to the huge demand from its clients.
Although Bloomberg had initially reported at the tail end of 2017 that Goldman Sachs was working to implement a cryptocurrency trading desk that would be launched in 2018, Business Insider claimed earlier this week that the project wasn’t likely to see the light of day. The report released by Business Insider attributed its information to an anonymous source that claimed Wall Street was no longer interested in the crypto-trading desk due to the uncertain regulatory future of the industry.
According to Chavez, “The next stage of the exploration is what we call non-deliverable forwards, these are over the counter derivatives, they’re settled in U.S. dollars and the reference price is the bitcoin-U.S. dollar price established by a set of exchanges”. Chavez also mentioned that media frenzy over Goldman Sachs’ crypto trading platform did not take into account that the industry was not quite ready or mature enough for such a venture.
Chavez added, “When we talked about exploring digital assets […] it was going to be (an) exploration that would be evolving over time. Maybe someone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical Bitcoin, and as they got into it they realized part of the evolution but it’s not here yet.”
The Goldman Sachs CFO cleared the air and said that the bank no intent in proceeding with physical Bitcoin trading at the current juncture as a more reliable custody solution was necessary before such an option could be given some serious thought. Chavez concluded his proclamation by speaking about Goldman Sachs venturing directly into Bitcoin and said, “Physical bitcoin is something tremendously interesting, and tremendously challenging. From the perspective of custody, we don’t yet see an institutional-grade custodial solution for Bitcoin, we’re interested in having that exist and it’s a long road”.
