Despite the 80% collapse in crypto prices this year, Goldman Sachs says its crypto trading is significantly higher in native volumes, translating into stability in dollar terms.

That’s according to Andrei Kazantsev, who heads Goldman Sachs’ cryptocurrency trading globally. The bank offers market making in cash-settled derivatives in the form of options and non-deliverable forward contracts.

The cryptocurrency industry has been talking about its institutional adoption for years. But for a period hedge funds dominated.

“Before, only hedge funds were interested in cryptocurrencies. It definitely isn’t anymore,” Kazantsev said speaking at the Crypto Assets conference, noting interest from asset managers and pension funds.

He also addressed the risks of the sector.

“Everyone says that it is a highly volatile asset. How can it be investable for large asset managers? In reality, many asset managers are already involved in very high volatility currencies. In FX we have seen many episodes of local volatility, for example in Turkey, Russia, Brazil, in many EM (emerging market) countries. So this is not something new,” Kazantsev said.

“As long as you put strong risk management frameworks in place around that, it’s manageable. And it’s another asset class that can potentially provide high returns.”

Recent bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency sector have highlighted counterparty risks, which is one of the reasons why traditional clients would prefer to trade with a counterparty like Goldman.

“The number of incoming customer calls we receive is constantly increasing across the board, across different customer bases,” added Kazantsev.

Beyond cryptocurrency trading, Goldman is involved in numerous blockchain initiatives. Working with Digital Asset, he is developing his tokenization platform to support multiple asset classes. He has been participating in JP Morgan’s Intraday Repo platform for more than a year. And at HQLAX, the collateral management platform.

Apart from these activities, it has made several investments. These include Digital Asset, crypto trading platform Elwood, crypto security firm Certik, infrastructure firm Blockdaemon, and crypto data firm Coin Metrics.