Goldman’s Digital Assets team is open to hiring for the Blockchain platform

by Arthur · February 28, 2023

In an interview, the team’s global head Mathew McDermott said the bank remains “hugely supportive” of exploring blockchain applications and that the digital assets division will hire “as appropriate” this year.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s digital assets team signaled it is open to bolstering its workforce and flagged the potential for blockchain technology to improve the functioning of markets such as private equity.

In an interview, the team’s global head Mathew McDermott said the bank remains “hugely supportive” of exploring blockchain applications and that the digital assets division will hire “as appropriate” this year.

McDermott spoke last week in Hong Kong after the city used Goldman’s tokenization platform, GS DAP, to sell initial digital green bonds. His team is now around 70 people compared to four members in 2020 when he took charge of it.

Goldman as a whole embarked on one of its biggest rounds of job cuts ever last month, cutting about 3,200 jobs. The crypto sector is also reeling from thousands of layoffs following a $1.5 trillion market crash in 2022 and the implosion of the FTX exchange. While token prices have stabilized recently, cryptocurrencies remain the exception rather than the rule.

GS DAP is a private blockchain instead of a public one like Ethereum. Hong Kong used it in the sale of HK$800 million ($102 million) of tokenized green bonds, cutting settlement to one day after the trade from five.

McDermott said he could see the GS DAP being used for other assets, such as options, mutual funds, derivatives and private equity. Settlement and pricing of shares and IPOs are already efficient enough, he added.

“The blockchain platform allows investors to see more data, have more transparency, more accurate pricing of an asset, which will then encourage more liquidity and hopefully bring more investors into the secondary market,” McDermott said.

Tokenization has long been touted as a potentially key use of digital ledgers. Proponents argue that it could make illiquid assets like private equity easier to buy and sell, and that investments like bonds would settle faster.

But progress has been relatively slow and mistrust of crypto in general is elevated following FTX’s wipeout and a number of other explosions.

Porting large financial transactions to public blockchains could be years away due to regulatory doubts about the security and soundness of such networks, McDermott said.