BlackRock’s Larry Fink has suggested that investors put their money in bitcoin instead of gold to hedge against inflation.
Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash
Posted on July 5, 2023 at 6:53 PM ET.
Last week, BlackRock’s application for a spot Bitcoin ETF sparked a new wave of applications from other investment managers seeking approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).some industry watchers dubbed The event was the one that “broke life” into the cryptocurrency space, with existing digital asset funds recording hundreds of millions of dollars in inflows since filing.
In an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he believes the role of cryptocurrencies is, in many ways, “the digitization of gold.” . He suggested that bitcoin could become an alternative to gold to prevent inflation and devaluation of the local currency.
“To be clear, Bitcoin is a global asset,” Fink said.
“It is not based on a specific currency, so it can represent an asset that people can play with as an alternative currency.”
BlackRock CEO’s statements today are in stark contrast to what he said in 2017. explained Bitcoin as an “indicator of money laundering”. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at just $5,800, but has risen 470% over the course of the year.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $30,450 and Fink’s comments have had little impact on the price. But the fact that major digital assets now appear to be less susceptible to price volatility may be why larger institutional investors are taking it more seriously.
While the SEC has yet to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF, market participants are particularly optimistic about BlackRock’s potential given the investment manager’s track record of approving nearly all ETF applications.
“As before, we are working with the regulators and hopefully one day the application will be approved, but I don’t know what that day will be, but we’ll see how it goes.” said he. Fink.
“We believe that the further tokenization of assets and securities, which is Bitcoin, has the potential to revolutionize finance.”
