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Dec 7 (Reuters) - Elizabeth Howcroft Crypto Correspondent
Hello, Welcome to the first edition of Reuters Crypto Wire, our weekly round-up of the tumultuous world of cryptocurrencies and digital assets. We’ll explain what you need to know about the week’s biggest stories, plus I'll recommend some essential reading.
Goldman Goes Shopping The cryptocurrency market is floundering after last month’s collapse of the American exchange FTX. The sudden demise of the crypto industry’s so-called “poster child” was the latest in a series of bankruptcy filings and price crashes which have sapped investor confidence so far this year. The price of bitcoin is stuck at around a quarter of its November 2021 peak, more than $2 trillion has been knocked off the global market cap of all cryptocurrencies since then and crypto investors are nursing huge losses on speculative bets. But for Goldman Sachs, it’s time to make deals. Mathew McDermott, who runs Goldman’s digital assets team, told Reuters reporters in London that the bank plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on crypto firms, which are now more “sensibly” priced. It’s currently doing due diligence on several companies, he said, as well as building its own private distributed ledger technology. It’s a small sum for a Wall Street giant to spend but McDermott’s comments underscore the banking industry’s interest in the technology behind cryptocurrencies. Since FTX’s collapse, McDermott said he’s seen more financial institutions wanting to trade crypto with Goldman and he suspects that some of them are ex-FTX customers. But while some investors look forward to bargain-hunting, others are cautious. Morgan Stanley’s CEO told Reuters last week that while he doesn’t think crypto is a fad, he can’t put an intrinsic value on it. HSBC’s CEO told a banking conference he has no plans to expand into crypto trading or investing for retail customers. It’s too soon to say whether crypto really is on its way out (or “on the road to irrelevance”, as the European Central Bank put it last week), but investors are still on tenterhooks waiting for further signs of FTX-fallout. Attention is on Genesis, a company owned by Digital Currency Group. Its lending arm, Genesis Global Capital, suspended customer redemptions last month and said last week that it was working to avoid a bankruptcy filing.
Crypto Essentials
Crypto Graph Crypto’s losses weigh heavily on the retail investors around the world who have tried their hand at speculating. Roughly 73% to 81% of people who trade crypto on an individual, non-professional, basis have likely lost money, according to one study conducted between 2015 and 2022.
What I'm Reading
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