Goldman Sachs CFO holds BTC; says the institutional clients want Bitcoin

On 7th September, during the TechCrunch Conference, Disrupt, the CFO of Goldman Sachs, Martin Chavez said that he holds some Bitcoins since 2015 and reveals the financial giant’s stance on Bitcoin [BTC].

The subject regarding cryptocurrency which was covered by the CFO of Goldman Sachs was about the news that was circulating in the cryptocurrency space; Goldman Sachs dropping the launch of Bitcoin Trading Desk. Some of the market speculators even believed that the price of BTC and other cryptocurrencies in the market plunged because of this.

However, Martin stated that this news was off-guard as the firm had not made any announcement regarding the Bitcoin Trading Desk. He said:

“It wasn’t like we announced anything or that anything had changed for us. I think one of the wonderful things about being a Goldman Sachs is we do get written about a lot and I never thought I’d hear myself actually use this term, but I’d really have to describe that as fake news.”

According to him, the financial services sector is “very broad” and there are a lot of important distinctions in the sector. Martin continued to say that when the firm began exploring digital assets, they knew that this exploration was going to evolve over time. He said:

“… we’ve got a commodities business. We’ve been in the commodities market for a long, long time and Bitcoin, some think of it as a currency. It actually has a lot more properties you could ague as commodities. And in the commodities market, there’s many ways to participate.”

The CFO of Goldman Sachs further said that the case with Bitcoin is similar to that of people participating in the actual trading and futures contract trading of physical oil. This type of trading does not make an actual delivery of the physical oil. The counter cash-settled derivatives are linked to the price of oil, which also does not “make or take the delivery of oil.”

He added that the firm is trying to do the same with Bitcoin and that is the main factor that has always driven the firm’s institutional clients. In addition, the firm’s clients demanded them to clear the Bitcoin futures contracts that are offered by exchanges and Goldman Sachs has been working towards it since May.

Martin said:

“…then the clients said, we would like for you to also provide us liquidity and trade the principle as principle of futures contract, not just clear them and so we’ve been faint that. The next of the exploration is what we call non deliverable forwards. It’s these derivatives over the counter derivatives.”

He continued to say that they will be settled in US dollars and that the reference price would be the Bitcoin-US dollar price, which will be established by a set of exchanges. The firm is currently working on the Bitcoin futures as the clients wanted physical Bitcoin. He added:

“… something tremendously interesting and tremendously challenging from the perspective of custody. We don’t yet see an institutional grade custody cases, custodian solutions for Bitcoin. We’re interested in having that exist and its a long road”

The discussion over cryptocurrencies ended with Martin saying that he owns 5 Bitcoin [BTC]s. He said that his friend whom he met a few years back sent him the Bitcoin. Although Martin wanted to own them, he was a little skeptical about it.