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Goldman Sachs makes history with its over-the-counter crypto trade

It's the first major U.S. bank to conduct a transaction of that kind, in a sign of the growing institutional presence in cryptocurrency trading.

Goldman Sachs is the first major U.S. bank to conduct over-the-counter crypto options trade.

Wall Street is getting deeper and deeper into crypto.

Image: Tomas Eidsvold/Unsplash

Goldman Sachs has executed the first over-the-counter crypto options trade by a major U.S. bank, in a move that calls further attention to Wall Street’s embrace of digital assets.

The transaction underlined the "continued maturation and adoption of digital assets by banking institutions," Galaxy Digital Holdings, the crypto financial services firm which facilitated the deal, said in a statement. The trade involved a bitcoin non-deliverable option, a derivative pegged to the price of bitcoin that pays out in cash.

Galaxy Digital last year became Goldman Sachs’ liquidity provider for its bitcoin futures block trades as the Wall Street giant moved to expand into crypto.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

goldman sachsinstitutional cryptogalaxy digital holdingscryptocurrency
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