The large American multinational bank Goldman Sachs has appointed a pro-blockchain head of its digital asset department – Mathew McDermott. In a recent interview, McDermott expressed his views that the global financial scene should be digitalized and even hinted that Goldman is exploring the possibility of launching its own stablecoin.
Headquartered in New York City, Goldman Sachs has not displayed much favoritism towards the cryptocurrency industry in the past. In a recent conference call headlined US Economic Outlook & Implications of Current Policies for Inflation, Gold, and Bitcoin, the behemoth bank claimed that the primary cryptocurrency is not an asset class.
However, Goldman may be more supportive of digital economies and digital currencies, at least judging by the developments around the bank’s digital assets department. Mathew McDermott used to run the bank’s internal funding operations and was recently appointed as the head of digital assets.
In a recent CNBC interview, McDermott highlighted his optimism in building a digital financial economy, running primarily on blockchain.
“In the next five to ten years, you could see a financial system where all assets and liabilities are native to a blockchain, with all transactions natively happening on-chain. So what you are doing today in the physical world, you just do digitally, creating huge efficiencies. All that can be debt issuances, securitization, loan origination; essentially, you will have a digital financial markets ecosystem, the options are pretty vast.”
He added that many current legacy processes are slow and cost-inefficient. By “leveraging distributed ledger technology, you can standardize processes to manage collateral across the system, and you have a much more efficient settlement process given the real-time settlement.”
Interestingly, Morgan Creek Digital co-founder and long-time Bitcoin and blockchain proponent Anthony (Pomp) Pompliano commented on McDermott’s words, saying that “Wall Street is about to learn why technologists say innovate or die.”
Upon his appointment, McDermott has reportedly brought in the head of digital assets strategy at rival bank JPMorgan Chase – Oli Harris. Harris has been involved with the first digital coin by a major bank announced last year – JPM Coin.
Consequently, this has raised speculations whether Goldman is examining a similar path, which McDermott confirmed: “We are exploring the commercial viability of creating our own fiat digital token, but it’s early days as we continue to work through the potential use cases.”
The new head of digital assets at Goldman also asserted that “we have definitely seen an uptick in interest across some of our institutional clients who are exploring how they can participate in the space.” As a result, the cryptocurrency field is experiencing a “resurgence of interest.”
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