Larry Fink, CEO and Chairman of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, touched on three blockchain related topics in this year’s annual letter. The first part of his letter was about how private markets have been out of reach for most investors and BlackRock is in the process of changing that. For the same reason, the digital assets sector often sees private assets as low hanging fruit for tokenization, as illustrated in this State Street survey.
Later he moved on to tokenization, highlighting how fractionalization can democratize access. Finally he referenced Bitcoin. On the one hand, BlackRock manages the largest Bitcoin ETF. However, his concern is more about getting control over the United States’ government debt.
“Decentralized finance is an extraordinary innovation. It makes markets faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Yet that same innovation could undermine America’s economic advantage if investors begin seeing Bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar,” he wrote.
He also shared that half of the demand for the Bitcoin ETF has been retail, and three quarters of those investors are new to iShares ETFs.
Private assets and tokenization
On the tokenization front, Mr Fink noted that the “world’s money moves through plumbing built when trading floors still shouted orders and fax machines felt revolutionary.” He was less than complimentary about payments network SWIFT saying it was like routing emails through a post office. SWIFT currently dominates cross border payments, which are seen as a major real world use case for stablecoins. And it’s worth remembering that BlackRock looks after most of the reserve assets for the second largest stablecoin issuer, Circle.
He is bullish on tokenization because he sees it as democratizing access, shareholder voting and yield. The access is because tokenization enables fractionalization, lowering the barrier to entry. Even for relatively wealthy people, lower investment amounts will allow them to diversify their investment. Of course, people can vote already, but blockchain can potentially make it easier. He had one caveat about tokenization 👉 the need for digital identity.
Despite BlackRock managing the largest Bitcoin ETF, there was a striking omission in Fink’s projections for the future of investing: cryptocurrency itself. While he outlined a shift from the traditional 60:40 split between stocks and bonds toward a 50:30:20 allocation (stocks, bonds, and private assets), cryptocurrency doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories.
Fink acknowledged that 20% of investments already exist in private assets, currently accessible primarily to institutional investors. And he highlighted how BlackRock plans to democratize access to these investments, including infrastructure and real estate. Potentially, that could include tokenization. Yet the absence of cryptocurrency in this long-term investment framework is notable, given BlackRock’s current role as a crypto asset manager.
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