2021-05-02 21:00:32
Are Wall Street Giants Playing the 'Make-Bitcoin-Cheaper' Game Again? It seems that the Wall Street actors may be playing the same game seen in January - bashing bitcoin (BTC) when it looks relatively weak, while and/or before doing their own BTC-related move. We saw this from JPMorgan and Guggenheim Partners earlier, and now it's Goldman Sachs.
This week, US-based investment giant Goldman Sachs said that the competition from other cryptoassets, energy use, and lack of use cases are among the concerns surrounding bitcoin's long-term store of value demand.
It is too early for bitcoin to compete with gold for safe-haven demand, said the bank, but the two can co-exist, as Reuters reported. It added that the extensive energy use made it vulnerable to losing its store of value demand to a "better-designed" contender.
"While Bitcoin benefits from greater liquidity, it suffers from lack of real use and weak environmental, social, governance (ESG) scoring, due to its high energy consumption," the banks is quoted as saying. "The only way this record-sized and fast approaching supply crunch can be solved is via a surge in price to new record highs."
Furthermore, in the same note, Jeffrey Currie, Goldman's head of commodities research, said, per Kitco, that BTC "gave ground to other cryptocurrencies such as ether and altcoins. This, in our view, underscores the fact that competition among cryptocurrencies for the status of dominant long-term store of value is still on and adds an additional source of risk to holding bitcoin."
Just a month ago, it was reported that Goldman Sachs aims to offer its first investment vehicles for bitcoin and other unspecified digital assets to clients of its private wealth management group in the second quarter of this year. Some of the clients were reportedly considering BTC to be a hedge against inflation.
The bank also offers a crypto trading desk and is dealing BTC futures and non-deliverable forwards for their clients.
Furthermore, earlier in March, Goldman said it saw rising demand for BTC not only among institutional investors, but also in the private wealth management industry.
The company has delivered several relatively favorable views on crypto over the years. In late November 2017, Currie said that BTC was a commodity with many similarities to gold, and that the volatility that concerned investors stemmed mainly from its lack of liquidity. "I don’t see why there is all this hostility to it," Currie told Bloomberg back then. BTC is "not much different than gold." He added though that the "real innovation" is in the ledger, not in BTC itself.
In January this year, Currie stated that bitcoin was showing signs of maturity, but that the level of institutional investment in it was still very small - more is needed for it to stabilize. BTC had a market value of above USD 600bn at the time and over USD 1trn today. "That can give you some long-run equilibrium," Currie told CNBC. But the level of volatility and uncertainty in the market "makes it very difficult to forecast it."
3 views18:00
C
