BlackRock CEO Larry Fink calls bitcoin 'legitimate financial instrument'

BlackRock Cofounder and CEO Larry Fink has changed his mind on cryptocurrencies over the years .

"I was a proud skeptic," Fink said Monday on CNBC , "and I studied it, learned about it, and I came away saying, okay, you know, my opinion [for] five years was wrong."

BlackRock’s IBIT has become the largest spot Bitcoin BTC +5.07% exchange-traded fund by market cap, leading Fink to double down on his statement that bitcoin is like digital gold.

BlackRock also recently hit a major milestone for its digital asset class: The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity (BUIDL) fund surpassed $500 million in market value . This makes BUIDL the highest-valued tokenized treasury fund in the world, according to its issuer, Securitize Markets.

“I'm not trying to say there's not misuses like everything else, but it is a legitimate financial instrument that allows you to have maybe uncorrelated, non-correlated type of returns,” Fink said Monday.

Last week, crypto investment products saw $1.44 billion worth of net inflows , bringing year-to-date figures to a record $17.8 billion, according to CoinShares. At publication time, IBIT has $18.44 billion in assets under management.

Fink runs a $10.6 trillion asset manager, and one expert said it is hard to overstate how big a deal it is for him to give these “full-throated endorsements” of bitcoin as a legit asset class for everyday portfolios.

“Buy in from BlackRock - as well as other legacy firms like Fidelity - gives boomer advisors comfort and cover to make the allocation. That's why betting against, or minimizing the clear-to-anyone-with-eyes-and-a-brain early success of, these ETFs has been and will be dumb IMO,” Bloomberg Senior ETF Analysts Eric Balchunas wrote in a post on X .

“The other reason Larry is a powerful advocate IMO is that he's all about stocks and bonds. He's pro-humanity,” Balchunas said in a followup post. “I think when someone is 100% invested in btc/crypto it can scare 60/40 ppl, bc it comes off as a 'doomsday bet against humanity' whereas Larry's saying hey just use a little as a hedge against govt debasement. This is much more palatable message and messenger (at least to the $30T advisor/boomer world).”

This echoed the sentiment Fink shared in his CNBC interview.

"Bitcoin is not an instrument for hope unless you're hopeful you're gonna make a lot of money on it," Fink said. "But I look at it as a vehicle in which you're expressing your financial acumen, in something that you're more frightened of your existence. And I believe there's a great industrial use for it. And I think a lot of people are missing that."