Bitcoin slipped below $7,000 Wednesday after a report came out that Goldman Sachs was abandoning plans to open a trading desk for cryptocurrencies. Later that day, the world’s largest digital currency even fell more, ending up in the $6,4o0 region. Fake news, according to Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Martin Chavez. GOLDMAN SACHS IS NOT ABANDONING CRYPTO!
Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Martin Chavez has explained that reports related to the company abandoning its intended cryptocurrency trading desk have been “fake news,” and described the entire scenario as a premature understanding. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco, the CFO of Goldman Sachs put the situation rather bluntly:
“I was in New York yesterday and I was co-chairing our risk committee, and I saw the news article,” said CFO Marty Chavez, referring to the report yesterday. “It wasn’t like we announced anything or that anything had changed for us… I never thought I’d hear myself actually use this term, but I’d really have to describe that as fake news.”
Furthermore, Chavez said that in fact, the bank is still considering how to offer services that involved physical Bitcoin, but that it has not yet set a timeline for it. Chaved mentioned:
“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.”
An article of Business Insider earlier this week claimed that Goldman Sachs was no longer interested in cryptocurrencies and that the project had been abandoned. The Business Insider report quoted unnamed sources as the basis of the information, giving evidence that the Wall Street firm had decided to do away with the previously hyped up trading desk. Apparently, the information spread by Business Insider was (and is) not true, according to Chavez.
Chavez has since come forth to say that the excitement over a Goldman Sachs crypto trading desk got ahead of the facts, with the industry not yet being at the point of maturation necessary for such a venture,
“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.”
Bitcoin hit a record valuation of nearly $20,000 in January, and it has struggled to return to those highs during the rest of this year. The cryptocurrency was priced at $6,530 at the time of writing, some way short of a months-long high of $8,266 on July 26, according to information from Coinmarketcap.com.
