Goldman Sachs is reportedly dropping plans for a cryptocurrency trading desk. The news, which broke late yesterday, sent crypto prices further down, but in this bear market, you’d be excused for not noticing.

The news, though dismissed or even spun into a good thing by crypto enthusiasts, can hardly be taken as a positive sign for bitcoin and the long tail of altcoins. The reason for backing off the initiative, which was announced late in 2017, is variously cited as concern over regulatory ambiguity to a lack of appetite among institutional investors for cryptocurrency.

“What I think Goldman is having a hard time with is they can’t really find a way to get institutional investors to invest,” Mitch Steve of RBC told CNBC. He pointed out that Goldman backs Circle, which has plenty of retail investors on board its trading platform, but they are waiting for a bitcoin ETF to be approved.

Other reports held that uncertainty in the regulatory situation was what made Goldman scale back its plans. Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times noted that though Goldman was halting plans to directly trade bitcoins, for now, plans to trade cryptocurrency futures were still moving ahead.

And plans for the desk aren’t dead, they are just delayed, which is “normal practice for banks,” as reported in Forbes. The same piece noted, “There is no doubt that the bitcoin price is supported by the hype that institutional banks are going to get involved,” which is what makes this move of such concern.

Goldman Sachs is reportedly putting a stop to its #bitcoin trading desk, but @RBC‘s Mitch Steves says Wall Street isn’t over #crypto just yet. pic.twitter.com/c0paalEsL6

— CNBC’s Fast Money (@CNBCFastMoney) September 5, 2018 

Goldman Sachs is reportedly putting a stop to its #bitcoin trading desk, but @RBC's Mitch Steves says Wall Street isn't over #crypto just yet. pic.twitter.com/c0paalEsL6

— CNBC's Fast Money (@CNBCFastMoney) September 5, 2018