Stone Ridge Asset Management owns NYDIG, and the “Stone Ridge Bitcoin Strategy Fund” provides access to Bitcoin through futures markets. The NYDIG fund joins Grayscale Investments’ Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Bitcoin Cash Trust, Ethereum Trust, and Ethereum Classic Trust, as well as the Osprey Bitcoin Trust, which the bank gained entry in July.
Although the conventional lender has made a significant step forward by providing crypto exposure via six distinct funds, it is apparently being careful in how it provides its latest digital-asset services. As per anonymous sources cited by Business Insider, JPMorgan advisers are not permitted to openly advocate cryptocurrency funds and may only carry out transactions at the behest of the customer.
The Grayscale and Osprey Funds are available to all users of the company’s different wealth management platforms, including its self-directed Chase trading app, while the NYDIG Fund is exclusively available to private banking customers. The investment banking behemoth has a complex relationship with cryptocurrencies, with CEO Jamie Dimon describing Bitcoin as “fraud” in 2017.
Goldman Sachs analysts seem to be grappling with some of similar problems, notwithstanding the firm’s aggressive efforts to provide coverage to the industry. In June, Jeff Currie, Goldman Sachs’ global director of commodities research, characterized Bitcoin as a “risk-on” asset comparable to copper. In the same month, the bank’s experts published a crypto study in which they determined that Bitcoin is neither “a long-term store of value nor an investable asset class.”
Goldman Sachs now offers cryptocurrency related services via a derivatives trading desk and a Bitcoin futures trading platform, both of which were launched in July. Furthermore, the company also applied for a kind of DeFi-based ETF late last month.