One day after bitcoin and other cryptos tumbled on a Business Insider report that Goldman Sachs was abandoning plans to open a trading desk for cryptocurrencies...

... the bank's chief financial officer looked to "clear the air" what was really going on.

Speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco, Goldman Sachs CFO Martin Chavez said "I never thought I would hear myself use this term but I really have to describe that news as fake news," CNBC reported.

Chavez looked to knock down the report about the banking dialing back plans, but also make clear that there's never been a timeline for this effort.

"When we talked about exploring digital assets that it was going to be exploration that would be evolving over time. Maybe someone 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 it they realized part of the evolution but its not here yet."

The price of bitcoin and other top cryptocurrencies tumbled after the initial report earlier this week, which however was never confirmed by Goldman. The Wall Street bank had been considering the launch of some sort of cryptocurrency option for clients for the past year. But it's never been quite clear just what the bank was planning.

"In response to client interest in digital currencies, we are exploring how best to serve them in this space," a Goldman spokeswoman told CNBC in October, when outgoing CEO Lloyd Blankfein tweeted that Goldman was "still thinking about bitcoin," and that the bank was "not endorsing/rejecting."

"Know that folks also were skeptical when paper money displaced gold," Blankfein said at the time.