Reuters reports that after the failure of the FTX exchange lowered valuations and decreased investor enthusiasm, Goldman Sachs planned to spend tens of millions of dollars to acquire or invest in cryptocurrency firms.
This would allow Goldman Sachs to leverage its credibility and expertise in industry standards to influence the businesses it owns. This has the potential to restore investor trust in the cryptocurrency market following a series of failures.
Mathew McDermott said, “We do see some really interesting opportunities, priced much more sensibly.” He added that “It’s definitely set the market back in terms of sentiment, there’s absolutely no doubt of that. FTX was a poster child in many parts of the ecosystem. But to reiterate, the underlying technology continues to perform.”
More recently, in an interview given the previous month, McDermott elaborated on the company’s perception of several particularly intriguing options that were also considerably more reasonably priced.
While Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told CNBC that he sees great potential in the underlying technology as its infrastructure gets more formalized, he still considers cryptocurrencies to be highly speculative as the FTX collapse played out.
Since the beginning of November, the crypto sector has been rocked by the FTX liquidation crisis and bankruptcy story, which have flipped the industry on its head. The failure of FTX continues to have a domino effect, which is having an effect on cryptocurrency-focused businesses who have some exposure to the troubled company.
Even while the amount Goldman may potentially invest is not a large sum for the Wall Street firm, which made $21.6 billion in revenue last year, the fact that the bank is prepared to keep investing despite the shakeout in the sector demonstrates that it sees a long term opportunity.
