Despite Goldman Clients Being ‘Quite Curious’ About Crypto, Still No Custody Options

 Despite apparent interest from  its customers, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has no immediate  plans to offer a cryptoasset wallet custodial service to its customers.  

This news came from head of digital assets at Goldman Justin Schmidt, who was a panelist at the recent Consensus:Invest conference in New York. Schmidt explained Goldman’s  reluctance in developing a virtual asset custody capability, intimating  that there are regulatory impediments getting in the way, saying in this  context “there are things that are more limited in terms of what we can  offer,” according to Bloomberg. 

One of the things we have to take into consideration when we’re  building out our business is what we can and cannot do from a regulatory  perspective. Justin Schmidt    

Rather than building its own  in-house solution, Goldman recently made headway into cryptoasset  custody by investing in BitGo’s Series B funding, along with Mike Novogratz, which raised a total of $58.5 million. 

Custody a Big Deal

BitGo offers an institutional  grade custody service to take possession and guarantee the safety of  cryptoassets. Fidelity, a multinational financial services company, also  recently launched their own custody platform. 

Mike Novogratz - whose trading desk is reported to have lost  $136 million dollars during 2018 amid a collapse in cryptoasset prices -  has previously elaborated on the importance of a custody solution,  saying during an October Bloomberg interview that availability of  custody solutions from reputable institutional names like ICE and Fidelity  are “one of the things that will get institutional investors involved  in crypto.” He said Fidelity had been working on their custody platform  for four years. 

ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a week ago the delay  of their upcoming bitcoin futures product Bakkt, which also doubles as a  custody service. Bakkt was set to launch in December, but now is set to  go live in late January of next year. Bakkt’s CEO, Kelly Loeffler, also  cited the difficulty of getting through the required regulation, in  order to launch their product.