Financial Giant State Street Sees Declining Crypto Demand From Institutional Investors – Finance Bitcoin News

Investment management firm State Street says institutional clients are not deterred from investing in cryptoassets despite falling prices. “There is a belief that the asset class is here to stay,” said a State Street executive.

State Street on institutional demand for crypto

State Street, a leading investment management firm, is seeing waning institutional demand for cryptocurrency despite a market selloff, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Monday.

Irfan Ahmad, State Street Digital’s product manager for the Asia-Pacific region, said the banking giant’s institutional clients remain keen on crypto and its underlying technology. He was quoted as saying:

During the June-July period, when things really heated up in terms of activity, we institutional clients didn’t necessarily see them double, but they weren’t really deterred from placing strategic bets on the asset class itself.

“The takeaway from that is, I think, there’s a belief that the asset class is here to stay,” the executive stressed.

State Street (NYSE: STT) operates in more than 100 geographic markets globally and employs approximately 40,000 worldwide. The financial giant had $38.2 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration and $3.5 trillion in assets under management as of June 30.

The company’s digital arm, State Street Digital, offers solutions for a variety of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, digital cash and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to its website.

Ahmad noted that a number of major investment firms, such as Goldman Sachs, have begun offering crypto products and are likely to make further moves into the crypto space. In April, Goldman Sachs offered its first bitcoin-backed loan.

The world’s largest asset manager, Blackrock, launched a spot bitcoin private trust in August. “Despite the steep decline in the digital asset market, we are still seeing significant interest from some institutional clients,” the firm said.

The State Street CEO further shared that institutional clients have been asking about launching crypto products, elaborating:

Certainly, our customers, they’ve been talking more pragmatically to us about how they might be able to launch products, or what our capabilities might be in the future to help them support the launch of those products.

Last July, State Street announced the expansion of its cryptocurrency service, citing soaring demand from traditional funds.

Crypto exchanges are also seeing increasing demand from institutional investors. The CEO of Bitstamp said in August that his trading platform is seeing “massive crypto interest” from institutional clients. In June, Binance launched a new platform for VIP and institutional crypto investors to increase support for institutional clients.

What do you think of the comments from State Street’s head about institutional interest in cryptocurrency? Let us know in the comments section below.

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open source systems, network effects and the intersection of economics and cryptography.