BlackRock’s Bitcoin spot ETF will ‘democratize’ crypto: CEO Larry Fink

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink may be biased when it comes to his firm’s application for a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, but he tells FOX Business the product would even the playing field for investors. 

“What we’re trying to do with crypto is make it more democratized with all of crypto and making it much cheaper for investors” Fink said during an interview on The Claman Countdown. “The bid-ask spread for crypto is very expensive. It does erode a lot of the returns….because it costs a lot of money right now to transact Bitcoin, and it costs a lot of money to get out of that. And so, we hope that our regulators look at these filings as a way to democratize crypto, and we’ll see in the future how that plays out” he added. 

BlackRock, last month, became the latest to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a spot Bitcoin ETF. The firm’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, if approved by regulators, will use Coinbase Custody as its custodian and would give investors exposure to the largest cryptocurrency by market cap without directly buying it, while a spot bitcoin ETF would track bitcoin’s underlying market price. 

In an additional SEC filing released Monday, more details were added to include amped up surveillance by Coinbase. 

Fink declined to provide any more details than contained in the public filing or how regulators may be interpreting it. 

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But he does think a Bitcoin product like this, can do what traditional ETFs did for the mutual fund industry. 

“ETFs was a big revolution for the mutual fund industry, and it’s really taking over the mutual fund industry. And we do believe that if we can create more tokenization of assets and securities and that’s what Bitcoin is, it could revolutionize, again, finance” he noted. 

While BlackRock, with $9 trillion in assets, is no doubt a heavy hitter, it also joining a long list of firms with similar applications that got nixed by the SEC including Grayscale, which is suing the regulator over the rebuttal. Fidelity and the CBOE have also been shot down. 

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler  (iStock/Reuters)

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has continued to beat back Bitcoin ETF applications unconvinced they will serve investors.  

BITCOIN FAITHFUL EMBRACE $31,000 LEVEL

Meanwhile, as for the volatile price of Bitcoin and other cryptos, the mere interest from BlackRock and others is credited with helping drive up the price of Bitcoin above the $30,000 level, rebounding over 95% from its 52-week low of $15,602.37 reached in November 2022, as tracked by Dow Jones Market Data Group. 

EDX Markets, backed by Charles Schwab and Fidelity, launched the first-of-its-kind digital asset marketplace which is also backed by Citadel Securities, Sequoia Capital and Virtu Financial on June 20, adding more big players to the mix. 

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“News of a new exchange backed by Fidelity and [Charles] Schwab and applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs submitted by both BlackRock and Wisdom Tree. The Bitcoin faithful have long argued that the more traditional financial names increase their exposure to digital assets the more entrenched they become and the broader their acceptance” said Jim Iuorio of TJM Institutional said on CME Active Trader as recently reported by FOX Business. 

As for Fink’s overall view on Bitcoin and crypto, he linked the asset class to modern day gold. 

“I do believe the role of crypto is its digitizing gold in many ways. It’s instead of investing in gold as a hedge against inflation, a hedge against the onerous problems of any one country or the devaluation of your currency or whatever country you’re in, let’s be clear. Bitcoin is an international asset” he said.