BlackRock Seeing Only 'A Little Bit' of Demand for Ethereum from Clients, Head of Digital Assets Says

Robert Mitchnick, the asset manager's head of digital assets, said that there's a misconception that BlackRock will have a "long tail" of other crypto services.

AccessTimeIconMar 22, 2024 at 4:05 p.m. UTC
Updated Mar 26, 2024 at 8:26 p.m. UTC
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The asset management giant BlackRock's (BLK) clients have some interest in Ethereum (ETH) but less than bitcoin (BTC), head of digital assets Robert Mitchnick said.

"I can say that for our client base, bitcoin is overwhelmingly the No. 1 focus and a little bit Ethereum," he said during a fireside chat at the Friday Bitcoin Investor Day conference in New York.

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  • For every other crypto asset, he said, demand is "very, very little."

    Perhaps it's only fitting that when asked about if BlackRock will be launching an exchange-traded fund that holds meme coin dogwifhat (WIF) anytime soon, Mitchnick said he didn't know what it was, noting that there's a misconception from the crypto industry that the asset manager will have a "long tail" of other services.

    "That's really not what we're focused on," he said.

    BlackRock ushered in a bullish optimism within the digital assets market in January when it got approval to offer the Bitcoin Bitcoin Fund (IBIT) to investors, which in less than two months of trading, became one of the top five ETFs overall in the market. The fund has attracted $15 billion in assets, significantly more than any of the other nine funds.

    Part of the reason why the asset manager – which in previous years had been opposed to bitcoin – decided to launch a bitcoin ETF was because clients were consistent and enduring in expressing their interest in bitcoin through both bull and bear markets, Mitchnick said.

    He said they had also gotten "frustrated" about how difficult it was to get exposure to the crypto asset.

    Most recently, BlackRock unveiled its tokenized asset fund, BUIDL, on the Ethereum network, with asset tokenization company Securitize acting as a transfer agent and tokenization platform.

    Edited by Aoyon Ashraf.


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    Helene Braun

    Helene is a New York-based reporter covering Wall Street, the rise of the spot bitcoin ETFs and crypto exchanges. She is also the co-host of CoinDesk's Markets Daily show. Helene is a graduate of New York University's business and economic reporting program and has appeared on CBS News, YahooFinance and Nasdaq TradeTalks. She holds BTC and ETH.


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