Technology

It sometimes feels like the price of Bitcoin rises and falls on the turn of a speculative dime, and yesterday we saw one such moment come to pass, when it was reported that Goldman Sachs was planning to drop a plan to build a Bitcoin trading platform, causing the price of the cryptocurrency to crash. But today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, the CFO of Goldman Sachs described the story as &fake news,& and said that in fact the bank is still considering how to offer services that involved physical Bitcoin, but that it has not yet set a timeline for it.

&I was in New York yesterday and I was co-chairing our risk committee, and I saw the news article,& said CFO Marty Chavez, referring to the report yesterday. &It wasn&t like we announced anything or that anything had changed for us…I never thought I&d hear myself actually use this term, but I&d really have to describe that as fake news.&

As Chavez described it, Goldman Sachs had been building a Bitcoin trading platform modelled on a commodities futures trading platform, where there is never any Bitcoin traded, but more the promise of how the currency might move.

&Our institutional clients said, ‘We would love for you to clear these new Bitcoin-linked futures contracts offered by the exchanges,& so we&ve been doing that, and then clients since May [started to ask], ‘We would like for you also to provide us liquidity and trade the principal as principal the futures contracts, not just clear them,& and so we&ve been doing that, the next stage of the exploration, what we call ‘non-deliverable forwards.&

&These are derivatives, over the counter derivatives,& he continued. &They&re settled in U.S. dollars and the reference price is the Bitcoin U.S. dollar price established by a set of exchanges, the same one thatreferenced in the futures contracts, and we&re working on that now because the clients wanted physical Bitcoin — something tremendously interesting and tremendously challenging. From the perspective of custody, we don&t yet see an institutional grade custody cases custodian solution for Bitcoin.&

While companies like Coinbase are trying to tap into that demand by offering custodial services aimed squarely at institutional money, but Goldman itself still hasno timeline for when its own offering might be ready.

&We&re interested in having that exist, and ita long road and so I would just be speculating.Maybesomeone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical Bitcoin, and as they got into realizing that thatpart of the evolution but itnot here yet.&

Bitcoin — and the crypto market generally — suffered significantprice losses this week off the back of reports of Goldmanaborted plans, but that wasn&t the sole trigger.Reuters also reportedthat EU is looking into regulating crypto and is preparing a report that proposes to regulate exchanges and ICOs.

Bitcoin hit a record valuation of nearly $20,000 in January, and it has struggled to return to those highs during the rest of this year. The cryptocurrency was priced at$6,536 at the time of writing, some way short of a months-long high of $8,266 on July 26, according to information from Coinmarketcap.com.

Over the past two days, 21 companies have taken the stage at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield. We&ve now taken the feedback from all our expert judges and chosen five teams to compete in the finals.

These teams will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges and answer even more in-depth questions. Then one startup will be chosen as the winner of the Battlefield Cup — and they&ll also take home $100,000.

Here are the finalists. The competition will be livestreamed on TechCrunch starting at 1:35pm on Friday.

CB Therapeutics

CB Therapeutics is a new biotech company that aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab, out of sugar. What itdone is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars.

Read more about CB Therapeutics here.

Forethought

Forethought has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.

Read more about Forethought here.

Mira

Mira is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they&re fertile.

Read more about Mira here.

Origami Labs

Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphonebuilt-in assistant & whether thatGoogle Assistant or Siri & in an all-new way.

Read more about Origami Labs here.

Unbound

Unbound makes fashion-forward vibrators, and their latest is the Palma. The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. And the team plans to add accelerometer features.

Read more about Unbound here.

The startup behind theMeuralart frame has been acquired by Netgear. The deal was announced during the router companyanalyst day and was confirmed to TechCrunch by a Meural spokesperson. Terms of the deal weren&t disclosed.

Netgear may feel like an odd suitor for this consumer hardware startup, but they were an early investor in them and the buy is certainly no more strange than the last exit in this smart art space, when Giphy bought Electric Objects, torched the hardware business and made the subscription content free to existing users.

Meural has built some very nice hardware. At $595 the companyart frames are a bit pricier than other products in the market, though its $40 annual subscription to its art network is much more palatable. The devicegesture controls also offer some quality controls beyond the mobile app.

Netgear seems to have some real interest in bringing the Meural hardware into its plans to hide wifi routers in plain sight in peoplehomes, an analyst at the event noted in Forbes.

Itcertainly an interesting prospect, this seems like an odd product to exercise this strategy with though. Smart art frames are at their ugliest when the power cord can&t be hidden and itprobably going to be a tad difficult for you to hide ethernet cords on your wall unless you&re hiding them in the wall which doesn&t work great when so many smart home hubs need a direct connection to your router.

Meural raised $9.3 million in funding from investors including Corigin Ventures,Bolt, Forefront Ventures, Firstrock Capital and Netgear.