Larry Fink suddenly likes bitcoin because BlackRock investors suddenly like bitcoin

Larry Fink once called bitcoin “an index of money laundering.” How times have changed.

7/16/24 2:02PM

In October 2017, as bitcoin hit a then-record high of $5,800, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink believed bitcoin was “an index of money laundering,” saying, “Bitcoin just shows you how much demand for money laundering there is in the world. That’s all it is.”

Seven years later, BlackRock’s chief has reversed his stance. From Fink’s CNBC interview on July 15:

I believe Bitcoin is a legitimate financial instrument that allows you to have uncorrelated, non-correlated returns. I believe it is an instrument that you invest in when you’re more frightened, an instrument when you believe countries are debasing their currencies by excess deficits…
When you want to hedge hope, bitcoin is not an instrument for hope. I look at it as a vehicle in which you’re expressing your financial acumen when you’re more frightened of the world, more frightened of your existence.

JUST IN: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says he is a major believer in #Bitcoin after studying it. pic.twitter.com/PZLUKX3WEo
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 15, 2024

A couple of notes on Fink’s comments. First, he’s not wrong about bitcoin being used as an investment instrument when countries are debasing their currencies. Bitcoin trading volume recently hit a 20-month high in Argentina, for example, where the annual inflation rate is 276%.

However, the idea that bitcoin is 1) uncorrelated or 2) an asset to “hedge hope” is simply not backed by data. Bitcoin has historically traded in line with tech stocks, and its long-running correlation with the Nasdaq 100 is 0.805 (where 1.0 would be perfectly correlated, and -1 would be inversely correlated). Additionally, in March 2020, when financial markets collapsed during the onset of the Covid pandemic, bitcoin’s price fell by more than 50%, hardly the performance you would expect from a “hope hedge.” Bitcoin has, historically, traded like a high-beta tech stock, not an uncorrelated hedge.

My $0.02? Fink’s new-found bullishness toward bitcoin has less to do with his opinion on the cryptocurrency’s investment potential, and more to do with his clients’ increasing appetites for bitcoin.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with more than $10 trillion in assets under management. In 2023, BlackRock’s revenue, largely derived from management fees, was $17.8 billion. As the world’s largest asset manager, part of BlackRock’s job is to provide investors with investment solutions that meet their demands.

In July 2018, nine months after Fink referred to bitcoin as an index of money laundering, he told Bloomberg, “I don’t believe any client has sought out crypto exposure.”

It seems that had changed by 2022, when BlackRock partnered with Coinbase, allowing institutional clients using its Aladdin investment management platform to access bitcoin through Coinbase’s institutional platform: Coinbase Prime. At the time of the announcement, BlackRock’s Global Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships, Joseph Chalom, said (emphasis ours):

Our institutional clients are increasingly interested in gaining exposure to digital asset markets and are focused on how to efficiently manage the operational lifecycle of these assets. This connectivity with Aladdin will allow clients to manage their bitcoin exposures directly in their existing portfolio management and trading workflows for a whole portfolio view of risk across asset classes.

In January 2024, the SEC approved spot bitcoin ETFs, allowing investors to have exposure to bitcoin without directly holding it, and, more importantly, allowing asset managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity to offer bitcoin vehicles to their investors.

In the six months since, BlackRock’s “iShares Bitcoin Trust'' has grown to $18.2 billion in assets, making it the biggest bitcoin ETF on the market. The asset manager is charging a 0.25% management fee, giving Fink a $45 million reason to speak more fondly of the cryptocurrency.

Maybe Fink’s thoughts on bitcoin’s viability as an investment have changed, maybe they haven’t. But there’s no denying that bitcoin’s viability as a revenue stream for Fink’s company has improved over the last few years.

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.