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BlackRock Seeing Only 'A Little Bit' of Demand for Ethereum from Clients, Head of Digital Assets Says
Robert Mitchnick, the asset manager's head of digital assets, said that there's a misconception that BlackRock will have a "long tail" of other crypto services.
Updated Mar 26, 2024, 8:26 p.m. Published Mar 22, 2024, 4:05 p.m.
The asset management giant BlackRock's (BLK) clients have some interest in Ethereum but less than bitcoin , head of digital assets Robert Mitchnick said.
"I can say that for our client base, bitcoin is overwhelmingly the No. 1 focus and a little bit Ethereum," he said during a fireside chat at the Friday Bitcoin Investor Day conference in New York.
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For every other crypto asset, he said, demand is "very, very little."
Perhaps it's only fitting that when asked about if BlackRock will be launching an exchange-traded fund that holds meme coin dogwifhat (WIF) anytime soon, Mitchnick said he didn't know what it was, noting that there's a misconception from the crypto industry that the asset manager will have a "long tail" of other services.
"That's really not what we're focused on," he said.
BlackRock ushered in a bullish optimism within the digital assets market in January when it got approval to offer the Bitcoin Bitcoin Fund (IBIT) to investors, which in less than two months of trading, became one of the top five ETFs overall in the market. The fund has attracted $15 billion in assets, significantly more than any of the other nine funds.
Read more: BlackRock's ETF Demand Ranks Among Top 5
Part of the reason why the asset manager – which in previous years had been opposed to bitcoin – decided to launch a bitcoin ETF was because clients were consistent and enduring in expressing their interest in bitcoin through both bull and bear markets, Mitchnick said.
He said they had also gotten "frustrated" about how difficult it was to get exposure to the crypto asset.
Most recently, BlackRock unveiled its tokenized asset fund, BUIDL, on the Ethereum network, with asset tokenization company Securitize acting as a transfer agent and tokenization platform.
Read more: Thank BlackRock's Clients for Larry Fink's Change of Heart
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