Lloyd Blankfein says he's 'still thinking about bitcoin'
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has bitcoin on his mind, a day after reports broke that his firm was considering setting up a bitcoin trading operation.
The billionaire banker tweeted on Tuesday that he wasn't completely sure about his stance on the red-hot cryptocurrency.
Blankfein said he's "still thinking about bitcoin" and that he was not flat out endorsing or denouncing the digital currency. Here's the full tweet:
On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs is in the very early stages of potentially setting up a bitcoin trading operation.
"In response to client interest in digital currencies we are exploring how best to serve them in this space," a Goldman spokeswoman told The Journal.
If Goldman follows through, it will be the first blue-chip financial services firm to break into the cryptocurrency market, which this year has exploded in value by more than 720% to $145 billion.
Recently, a string of top Wall Streeters have weighed in on their thoughts about bitcoin, which is up 350% this year, and the broader cryptocurrency market.
It all started when JPMorgan Jamie Dimon called bitcoin "a fraud" and said it was "worse than tulips bulbs" in the 1600s. Then, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman took a more moderate position on bitcoin, saying it was "more than just a fad."
In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, the world's largest investor with $5.7 trillion under management, said he thinks the explosive growth of bitcoin points to nefarious behavior.
"It just identifies how much money laundering there is being done in the world," Fink said. "How much people are trying to move currencies from one place to another."