At the Consensus 2024 conference hosted by CoinDesk, Goldman Sachs said that the new spot Bitcoin ETFs are an “astonishing success.”
Mathew McDermott, the investment bank’s global head of digital assets, said the SEC’s approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs earlier this year marked a “big psychological turning point,” CoinDesk reports.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved eight spot Ethereum ETFs, and McDermott is hopeful that more progress will be made. “This is a natural progression that ETH will hopefully be approved to be a fully tradable ETF,” McDermott said at the conference.
A few years ago, Goldman Sachs was skeptical of crypto, saying it wasn’t suitable for investment. Soon, the investment bank said it recognized its potential, saying that not calling it successful would be “arrogant.”
Along with Goldman Sachs, other financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and others, entered the crypto world and introduced different financial products. Earlier this year, after the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs, the crypto industry became more mainstream than ever. Recently, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, became the world’s largest Bitcoin fund, amassing nearly $20 billion in total assets.
Financial giants such as BlackRock have started tokenizing assets, and McDermott believes this trend is growing due to its “digital lifecycle” advantages, CoinDesk reported.
When asked if crypto would ever replace banks, he said financial institutions like Goldman Sachs see crypto and blockchain as a way to improve efficiency and transform the financial world, per the report.
