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Goldman Sachs’ latest survey of institutional family office investors has found that interest in crypto has significantly faded among the wealthy elite, due to the extreme crypto market volatility of the past year.

The part of family offices that are not invested in crypto and are not interested in investing in it for the future has risen to 62% from 39% in 2021 when the investment banking giant first conducted its survey. The portion of those potentially interested in crypto investing for the future has also fallen to 12% from 45%, per the latest survey.

The results indicate a notable shift in sentiment after recent high-profile crypto collapses, including FTX, BlockFi and Celsius. Still, more family offices are today invested in cryptocurrencies than in 2021 — 26% today, up from 16% — with the most-citing rationale being their “belief in the power of blockchain technology.”

The survey captured responses from 166 family offices around the world, with a net worth of at least $500 million (93%) and 72% having at least $1 billion. The survey was conducted in January and February of this year.

Goldman Sachs uncovers fading crypto craze

During its last survey, in 2021, Goldman Sachs found that nearly half the family offices it did business with were interested in adding crypto to their investment portfolios because of “higher inflation, prolonged low rates, and other macroeconomic developments following a year of unprecedented global monetary and fiscal stimulus,”

Now they are interested in increasing allocations to public and private equities and adding fixed-income exposure to capture higher rate opportunities.

“With the flexibility to invest across the risk spectrum, family offices have maintained a largely consistent approach to more aggressive allocations as they seek superior returns,” Meena Flynn, co-head of global private wealth management and co-lead of One Goldman Sachs Family Office Initiative, said in a statement. “Planned risk-on allocations tell us they see strong opportunities to capture added alpha. This patient, strategic, long-term orientation is often an advantage in managing and preserving generational wealth.”

While institutional interest in crypto might be waning, Goldman Sachs recently said it is open to adding more staff to its 70-person digital assets team while flagging the potential for blockchain technology to improve the functioning of markets such as private equity. Earlier today, Goldman Sachs participated in crypto infrastructure company Digital Asset’s privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network, called the Canton Network, to provide a decentralized infrastructure for institutional clients.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto trading platform, wants in on the burgeoning Bitcoin Ordinals market amid a memecoin frenzy that is pushing BRC-20 tokens’ market value nearer to the $1 billion mark.

The company announced that its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace will, from late May, “support” Ordinals in order to further grow Binance’s “multi-chain ecosystem.” Binance customers will be able to buy and sell Ordinals without needing to utilize a “separate Bitcoin wallet,” the company said in a statement.

As Binance has said it has more than 100 million active users, the move could help to increase trading volumes for Bitcoin Ordinals, which has already benefitted from robust buying and selling. The total market value for BRC-20 tokens, the tokens created on Bitcoin through the Ordinals protocol, surpassed $900 million on Monday.

“Bitcoin is the OG of crypto,” said Binance’s Head of Product Mayur Kamat. “We are super excited to bring Bitcoin Ordinals to Binance NFT.”

The majority of tokens created using BRC-20 are memecoins, led by Ordi, which had a fully diluted market cap of $525 million as of Monday. The token began trading on Gate.io, making it the first centralized crypto exchange to list the most valuable BRC-20 token.

Other memecoins on BRC-20 include meme, domo, and nals.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The leading cryptocurrency exchange will allow NFT collectors to purchase tokens on the Bitcoin network directly through their Binance accounts – bypassing the need to create a separate wallet for inscriptions.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have come out swinging against federal prosecutors, seeking to preemptively dismiss most of the criminal charges made against the disgraced FTX co-founder and former CEO before a trial can take place.

A late filing on Monday by the fallen crypto mogul’s legal team seeks to toss fraud-related charges that they argue are duplicative, and also a campaign finance-related charge, on the grounds that the charge violates terms under which the Bahamian government extradited Bankman-Fried to the U.S. to face prosecution.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers filed seven motions to dismiss charges brought against him, arguing that most could not be prosecuted by the government. The argument made by the former FTX and Alameda Research CEO’s defense team also seeks to paint the trading platform’s practices as standard in the crypto industry, and lay blame with the U.S. government over its regulatory wrangling around digital assets over the last several years.

Blame crypto and the government, not FTX, SBF lawyers say

Calling the U.S. government’s pursuit of Bankman-Fried “a classic rush to judgment,” the FTX and Alameda owner’s defense team argues that shortcomings leading to FTX’s demise are common throughout the crypto industry. They also contend the company’s failure stems from a broader crypto winter, rather than reported failure to back FTX’s native token FTT, or secret loans from FTX to Alameda alleged by both prosecutors and the bankruptcy team put in place to manage the repayment of FTX customers and creditors.

“Like many other cryptocurrency market participants, and many other start-ups that experience exponential growth in a short period, FTX did not have fully developed controls and risk management protocols,” Bankman-Fried’s lawyers told the judge presiding over the case. “FTX, like other market participants, was susceptible to a broader market collapse.”

Bankman-Fried’s team also argues that “every major participant” in the crypto industry “cratered,” and draws parallels between the collapse of different digital asset firms and the 2008 global financial crisis, the catalyst for the popularity of bitcoin and growth of digital assets.

Double jeopardy question

In the motions filed with the federal Southern District of New York, Bankman-Fried’s defense team argues that a conviction in either of two pairs of charges would be a convocation for the same crime, since the charges stem from similar portions of the law. Defendants cannot be convicted twice for the same crime in the U.S., termed a right against “double jeopardy.”

The early defense effort argues that going to trial with multiple criminal charges that, in their eyes, could be canceled out by others he faces may lead to “undue prejudice” in his trial. It may also be an early effort by the defense to undermine the credibility of prosecutors in the eyes of a court or a future jury.

The pairs of charges in question are a charge of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and another of conspiracy to commit wire fraud on FTX customers; and a charge of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and another for conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on FTX customers. Bankman-Fried argues these pairs of charges are redundant, and that one of the charges from each pair should be withdrawn.

In separate but related motions to dismiss, the defense team also makes a series of more obscure legal arguments against other charges, including that the Bahamian government did not give its consent for some of the allegations brought against Bankman-Fried when it agreed to extradite him.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Financial technology company Digital Asset has announced it will be launching a privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network designed for institutional assets to provide a decentralized infrastructure, it announced Tuesday.

The move worked out in the end as the entity is sitting on a fat profit of several hundred thousand.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried filed pretrial motions to dismiss a majority of the charges he faces on various grounds late Monday.

The company said the product’s finalized payoff depends on the joint performance of both BTC and its gold-backed token XAUT.

ALSO: A crypto market analyst calls bitcoin’s travails of the past two days “growing pains,” and says the largest crypto by market cap “will be fine in the long run.”

The effects of the BRC-20 mints range from halting of bitcoin withdrawals on Binance to frustration with the sudden high costs of making bitcoin payments in places like Africa and South America.