Reports that Goldman Sachs was planning to launch a crypto trading desk have been labeled as fake by the company’s Chief Financial Officer CFO, Martin Chavez.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco reported by CNBC, Chavez cleared the waves surrounding the recent event. He revealed that the claim of “opening a crypto trading desk” was a misinterpretation of the company’s message back in December.
Chavez said in the report,
“I never thought I would hear myself use this term but I really have to describe that news as fake news.” Any plans that Goldman Sachs has about setting up a crypto desk is in the future but not very soon as his next comments revealed.
“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.”
Even though Goldman Sachs has been clearing and providing liquidity for Bitcoin-linked futures contracts from the CBOE and CME, the bank also does not plan to engage in Physical Bitcoin until there is a reliable custody solution in place.
“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,” he said.
Goldman Sachs To Develop Bitcoin Derivative
CFO Chavez revealed that the company is working on a type of Bitcoin derivative, non-deliverable forwards, which will be over the counter derivatives settled in U.S. dollars. Customer demands will fuel the new derivative, and the reference price will be the Bitcoin/USD price established by a group of exchanges.
The crypto markets were sent into a deep plunge following reports that the investment firm was not about to set up a crypto desk. Aside from dropping by 12 billion within an hour on Sept 5, all top coins suffered significant losses while Bitcoin hit a one month low, trading below $6500.
A bounce-back may already be on the way, with the total market cap now back up to 207 billion. Bitcoin press time price was $6524 while other top cryptocurrencies are also recovering from the plunge.
