After bitcoin fizzled and popped early last year, Wall Street seemed to lose interest. Goldman Sachs went quiet on plans to open a desk trading digital assets as the price of the cryptocurrency plummeted, falling as much as 80 per cent. In October last year JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon doubled down on his initial scepticism, saying he did not “give a shit” about bitcoin at a conference.

But now that prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have climbed back up, some senior figures in the financial services industry are thinking again, wondering whether it was the spike or the crash that was the anomaly. Flow Traders, an Amsterdam-based listed trading firm specialising in exchange-traded products, announced in April it was adding cryptocurrencies to its line-up. Last month a group of 50 companies including Jump Trading and DRW — two high-frequency trading houses — and Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant bank, formed a group to develop a “deep, efficient and secure” market.

“Over the past two years we have seen evidence building that bitcoin is an uncorrelated asset class so it makes sense to add it to portfolios,” said Marcus Swanepoel, a former Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered banker now running Luno, a crypto company.