BlackRock’s Larry Fink: Crypto’s TradFi Savior

What to know:
BlackRock, the asset management giant founded and run by Larry Fink, helped validate crypto for many on Wall Street by jumping into bitcoin ETFs.
Institutions embraced crypto, thanks to the trend Fink accelerated.
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 data 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.