Banks such as Goldman will not touch cryptocurrency spot markets but lean towards synthetic crypto products such as futures. Emulating tri-party repo type arrangements (a way of borrowing funds by selling securities with an agreement to repurchase them, involving a third-party agent), banks are exploring ways to follow the same path of not touching bitcoin, like other synthetic products.
“Goldman was working on getting approved for lending against collateral and tri-party repo,” said one of the people. “And if they had a liquidation agent, then they were just doing secured lending without ever having bitcoin touch their balance sheet.”