“I never thought I would hear myself using the term fake news”, a top Goldman Sachs executive has said, referring to a report that the financial giant was dropping plans to open a crypto trading desk.

Chief Financial Officer Martin Chavez was speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, which took place this week in San Francisco. The information being denied was initially reported by various outlets on 5th September, sending cryptocurrencies on a downward trend that cost Bitcoin, for example, over 5% of its value.

Hype over the trading desk was premature?

However, immediately after denying the information, Chavez suggested that the hype over a potential Goldman Sachs crypto trading desk may have been premature.

“When we talked about exploring digital assets it was going to be exploration that would be evolving,” he said. “Maybe someone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical Bitcoin, and as they got into it they realised part of the evolution, but it’s not here yet.”

Fake or not, cryptocurrency prices fell

EF Hutton Head of Digital Assets Research Christopher Daniels told Coin Rivet in an exclusive interview: “The cryptocurrency market is driven massively by sentiment.” In any case, the Goldman news, whether fake or not, has had an effect on the crypto market but “it is only a temporary setback and won’t have a meaningful impact”.

Goldman Sachs clients want Bitcoin

On the other hand, Chavez has commented that, “physical Bitcoin is something tremendously interesting and tremendously challenging” which is why his firm is working on a derivative for BTC because “clients want it”.

Chavez explained that, “the next stage of the exploration is what we call non-deliverable forwards, these are over the counter derivatives, they’re settled in US dollars, and the reference price is the Bitcoin-US dollar price established by a set of exchanges”.

Goldman Sachs has been clearing Bitcoin-linked futures contracts offered by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the derivatives marketplace CME since May and provides clients liquidity for those futures.