Inside BlackRock’s Crypto Strategy: Tokenization, Stablecoins & The Next Trillion | Robbie Mitchnick, Head of Digital Assets
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If you think about the big categories of institutional investors, you've got family offices, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments, foundations, corporate treasurers, insurers, right? Pension funds. You have some adopters in every one of those archetypes, but not the majority, not even close.
Robbie, you run crypto at, Black Rock, so I feel like you know more about institutions and crypto than just about anyone we've talked to on bank list. So I wanna start with the question that's on everyone's mind, particularly on a day like today. So we are recording this a day that's a little bit red in the crypto markets.
Sure
is. They seem to be coughing up a little bit. So prices. Is it over, or is this just a bear trap?
Gosh. Well, if we counted the the number of times that people have declared it over over the sixteen years, then that'd be a pretty high number. So, no. I I certainly don't think it is. I mean, to put it in perspective, right, this is the fifth cycle we've seen in, you know, Bitcoin and and crypto's history. Right? And through each of those five cycles or at least each of the four preceding cycles, you had these extraordinary bull markets. Right? And at the end of each a pretty severe correction, but through each successive cycle, the level that Bitcoin reached was massively higher than the pr
Let's talk about those four previous cycles and maybe now this this fifth one. So I guess it's not over for crypto. I think most bankless listeners would would wholeheartedly agree. I think they're wondering, though, if this cycle has is over. And so previously, crypto cycles have been boom bust in these four year increments. Some people talk about that following kind of the global liquidity trajectory. Others, you know, that it follows the the halvening. But we've seen this history play out before, and this would be the fourth year of a new cycle. So it's about time that Bitcoin would sort of
Well, I think there's a bunch of reasons why the cycles are probably less relevant on that sort of predetermined schedule that it seems to have followed in the past. Right? The first is a lot of people believe the cycle is tied to Bitcoin halving. Right? The Bitcoin halving at this point is almost totally irrelevant. Right? When ETFs are accumulating inflows, the magnitude of those inflows is many, many multiples larger than any change in supply created by a Bitcoin halving event from here until the end of Bitcoin. Right? So or till the till till the end of the Bitcoin reward function in in 21
It's a dangerous game.
Know, that one is a dangerous game, it's an interesting strategy, but it's also fascinating because when's the last time you heard or saw that behavior from most people in crypto markets, right? Most people in crypto markets say they tend to to get more enthusiastic, the more it's gone up, and they tend to sell as things go down, and that creates reflexivity in both directions. So now that you have this institutional participation, I think you have more ballast in the market. Look at October 10, example. The 21,000,000,000 in liquidations that we saw in crypto that day, and we could talk more
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