Larry Fink is nowhere close to being a first mover in cryptocurrencies. Yet, his firm, BlackRock, is making waves regardless and encouraging the rest of Wall Street to join the ride.
In 2023, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, shocked the investment and crypto community by filing for permission to create a bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund. BTC’s price soared following a giant of finance’s surprising entrance into the crypto realm.
In 2024, BlackRock got permission from U.S. regulators, as did several other issuers. Many suspect BlackRock putting its considerable weight behind bitcoin ETFs may have helped sway the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This event was an early nominee for Crypto Story of the Year, and while Donald Trump’s embrace of crypto on the campaign trail may have overshadowed this, the bitcoin ETF revolution remains high on the leaderboard.
The numbers show this.
Since the January approval, institutional investors have poured over $30 billion into the ETFs. This isn’t money coming from a tech-savvy crowd, or crypto “degens,” a term used to describe traders who take on high-risk, high-reward trading strategies. It’s capital that’s considered “smart money” given the extensive experience these hedge funds, endowments and other high-caliber firms have.
Here’s another number: Crypto’s market cap has grown from roughly $1 trillion when BlackRock filed paperwork for its bitcoin ETF to now nearly $3.6 trillion, according to veri from Coinmarketcap. We’re now in an era when dogecoin (DOGE), the memecoin created as a joke that has absolutely no utility, has a larger market cap than Ford (F) and nearly twice that of Adidas (ADS) — both long-established, highly regarded brands that have been around for many years.
Fink’s embrace of crypto surely helped pull the crypto industry out of its near-fatal post-FTX-collapse bear market.
Fink’s philosophy
Waiting for the right moment might just be Larry Fink’s secret sauce.
According to Fink, what sets a great company apart from good ones isn’t that they are the earliest adapter of a new trend, but rather their ability — and openness — to regenerate in an ever-changing world. BlackRock didn’t invent ETFs. Someone else did in 1993. But Fink’s company got huge in that space a decade and a half ago by acquiring iShares, which this year issued BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF as well as one that tracks Ethereum’s ether (ETH).
“There are many bad companies that have just a single product or a few products and don’t reengineer themselves; they don’t look at the ecosystem and see how it’s changing,”
Fink said in an