BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was once a “proud skeptic” of bitcoin, but now his money management giant is emerging as one of the biggest beneficiaries of a post-election surge in enthusiasm for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
BlackRock’s spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (IBIT) has swelled by $13 billion since Donald Trump’s win on Nov. 5, according to Yahoo Finance data, pushing iShares Bitcoin Trust past $40 billion in assets just 10 months following its launch.
That feat places IBIT among the top 1% of biggest ETFs in record time, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas.
“We had pretty optimistic projections, but, you know, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to put down as their base or even, maybe, their bull case that year one is going to rewrite the record book on inflows into the ETF category,” Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said last week on the Unchained podcast.
Plenty of other companies are also benefitting from the new boom as investors bet that pro-crypto legislation could be possible in Washington, D.C., under a new Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress.
The stock of Coinbase (COIN), the biggest US cryptocurrency exchange, is up 58% since the election. The stock of MicroStrategy (MSTR), a software company that became the largest corporate bitcoin holder, is up 50%.
The record inflows to BlackRock illustrate how crypto continues to move into the investing mainstream as it gets embraced by some of the biggest names on Wall Street — even some who were once its biggest critics.
Fink, who runs the world’s biggest money manager, falls into that category.
“I was a proud skeptic, and I studied it, learned about it, and I came away saying, okay, you know, my opinion [for] five years was wrong,” Fink said earlier this year while discussing his previous views with CNBC.
Perhaps the best example of that shift came in June 2023 when BlackRock filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot bitcoin ETF. That was back when the crypto and asset management industries had little evidence such a product would be approved by SEC chair Gary Gensler.
Yet it and 10 other money managers got the green light in January, followed by a listing on Jan. 12.
“BlackRock always seems to be in the right place,” Stephen Biggar, an analyst with Argus Research who covers the asset manager, told Yahoo Finance.
Its embrace of crypto (it also launched a smaller spot ether ETF in late July) coincided with an election year where pro–crypto Congressional candidates received millions in industry donations and Trump as a candidate made a number of promises to the industry.
Trump pledged to fire SEC chair Gensler, one of the industry’s greatest antagonists, appoint a crypto presidential advisory council and establish a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” with the help of Congress.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) then surged to a new all-time high above $93,000 in the week following Trump’s victory, before giving up some of those gains. It is now up 30% since the election and 112% so far in 2024.
On the Thursday after the election, spot bitcoin ETFs saw a record $1.3 billion in net assets pour in, according to Kaiko Research, and BlackRock reaped 85% of that total.
Its two crypto ETFs now represent approximately 42% of the total $102 billion of value in spot crypto ETFs across the industry.
“The amazing thing about this story is that it takes so long to build a good base,” Balchunas told Yahoo Finance. “And they did it so quickly that they were in such a good position to benefit from this rally.”
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust could rake in even more money from investors now that it has crossed the $40 billion threshold, as financial advisers succumb to the fear of missing out.
“There could come a point where advisers decide ‘I should have it to avoid getting fired’ versus ‘I don’t want to buy it and get my client mad for having some dumb bitcoin ETF’,” Balchunas said.
Such a “tipping point” would certainly spark a new wave of mainstream embrace of crypto, he added.
David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance covering banking, crypto, and other areas in finance.
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