By Samuel Indyk
Investing.com – Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) is the latest financial services company that is reportedly moving into the digital asset space, according to CNBC.
Mary Rich, Goldman Sachs’s global head of digital assets in its private wealth management division, has said they aim to begin offering investment vehicles for Bitcoin and other digital assets to clients of its private wealth management group from Q2 of this year.
Rich said the investment bank is looking at offering a “full spectrum” of investments in Bitcoin and digital assets, that could include physical Bitcoin, derivatives, or traditional investment vehicles.
Financial Services Companies in Crypto
Goldman Sachs is not the first major US bank to announce it has plans to enter the cryptocurrency market. In February, Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE:BK), America’s oldest bank, said it will hold, transfer, and issue Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on behalf if its asset management clients.
“Digital assets are becoming part of the mainstream,” said BNY Mellon’s Roman Regelman at the time.
Another financial services company, Fidelity Investments, announced in October 2018 it was planning to store and trade Bitcoin and Ethereum and has also won regulatory approval to operate its cryptocurrency business from New York.
Only this week, payments companies Visa (NYSE:V) and PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL) have announced cryptocurrency plans. Visa settled a transaction using the stablecoin USD Coin while PayPal launched ‘Checkout with Crypto’, allowing customers to pay merchants using cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin
The rally in Bitcoin has meant that demand from institutional investors became too much for the big financial firms to ignore.
“There's a contingent of clients who are looking to this asset as a hedge against inflation, and the macro backdrop over the past year has certainly played into that," said Rich. “There are also a large contingent of clients who feel like we're sitting at the dawn of a new Internet in some ways and are looking for ways to participate in this space."
Although relatively unreactive to this latest news, Bitcoin has surged over the last six months, rising from a low of around $10,000 in October to a high above $61,000 earlier in March as signs of corporate acceptance continue to grow. Just this month alone, the price of Bitcoin has jumped 28% and the world’s largest cryptocurrency saw its market cap breach $1 trillion.