Goldman Sachs, Wall Street Warming Up to Crypto Trading

Some of Wall Street’s biggest names are finally waring up to bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole. Since the first decentralized digital currency came into being, they have all been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world, but all this is about to change with the new bitcoin trading bid that a number of institutions are beginning to warm up to.

Spearheading this new development is Goldman Sachs which is slated to be the first Wall Street bank to launch and offer cryptocurrency-related trading services. The renowned financial institution is working on rolling out a number of derivative products that will allow its customers to buy contracts related to price fluctuations in bitcoin. In addition to this, Goldman Sachs also plans to create a more flexible type of futures product that will be referred to as a non-deliverable forward.

The non-deliverable product will be a trading approach that will involve no physical exchange of the underlying asset. Instead, it will involve the exchange of currency that is quoted on the settlement of the date of the forward.

Shortly after Goldman Sachs went public with its plans to set up a cryptocurrency trading desk, news that the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, has been working on an online bitcoin trading platform surfaced. This, for bitcoin, represents a dramatic yet welcome shift towards mainstream acceptance and usage especially considering the fact that the digital currency has often been associated with underworld activities and high-risk, speculative investment.

Ex-Goldman Sachs President Not Yet Sold on Bitcoin

While he believes that the world is on its ways towards a global currency, former Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, believes that the currency will not be bitcoin. In an interview with CNBC, Cohn said that he believes that the world will have a “global cryptocurrency at some point where the world understands it and it’s not based on mining costs or cost of electricity or things like that. This implies that the supposed global currency will have to be “more easily understood” than bitcoin.

“I’m not a big believer in bitcoin. I am a believer in blockchain technology. I do think we will have a global cryptocurrency at some point where the world understands it and it’s not based on mining costs or cost of electricity or things like that,” Cohn said in a “Squawk on the Street” interview. “It will probably have some blockchain technology behind it, but it will be much more easily understood how it’s created, how it moves and how people can use it.”