Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Goldman Sachs is setting up a trading desk to make markets in digital currencies such as bitcoin, according to people with knowledge of the strategy. The bank aims to get the business running by the end of June, if not earlier, two of the people said. Another said it's still trying to work out security issues as well as how it would hold, or custody, the assets. The move positions Goldman Sachs to become the first large Wall Street firm to make markets in cryptocurrencies, whose wild price swings and surging values have captured the public's imagination but given pause to established institutions. Goldman Sachs is now assembling a team in New York, one of the people said. While the bank hasn't made a decision where to house the desk, one possibility is that it will operate within the fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit's systematic trading function, which conducts transactions electronically, two people said.