NYSE Parent Company Plans Bitcoin Trading and Custody for Institutional Investors

According to the New York Times, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin.^[1]

This move by the NYSE’s parent company Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), follows Goldman Sachs’ foray into the Bitcoin space.

To be clear, these aren’t announcements of Bitcoin derivatives, like futures, they are aimed at offering crypto trading and custody to institutional investors.

It is probably a way out before any traditional financial company offers crypto services to retail investors (normal people without accredited status and big bankrolls), but the demand among institutional investors is great enough that we now see some competition from some serious players.

For more reading, see: Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency.

FACT: From my analysis, the price of Bitcoin is rising, but the search interest in cryptocurrency is not. In fact, search interest hasn’t been this low since sometime November 2017. It has almost been in a steady decline since January, and it is no longer correlating with crypto prices as it had been. This indicates that, while there is new money coming into the crypto space, the new money is from big players, not the average investor.