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BlackRock (BLK) CEO Larry Fink was once a "proud skeptic" of bitcoin, but now his money management giant is emerging as one of the biggest beneficiaries of a post-election surge in enthusiasm for the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
BlackRock’s spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (IBIT) has swelled by $13 billion since Donald Trump’s win on Nov. 5, according to Yahoo Finance data, pushing iShares Bitcoin Trust past $40 billion in assets just 10 months following its launch.
That feat places IBIT among the top 1% of biggest ETFs in record time, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas.
"We had pretty optimistic projections, but, you know, I don't think anyone's ever going to put down as their base or even, maybe, their bull case that year one is going to rewrite the record book on inflows into the ETF category," Robbie Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said last week on the Unchained podcast.
Plenty of other companies are also benefiting from the new boom as investors bet that pro-crypto legislation could be possible in Washington, D.C., under a new Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress.
Read more: Bitcoin clears another record: Is this a good time to invest?
The stock of Coinbase (COIN), the biggest US cryptocurrency exchange, is up 58% since the election. The stock of MicroStrategy (MSTR), a software company that became the largest corporate bitcoin holder, is up 50%.
The record inflows to BlackRock illustrate how crypto continues to move into the investing mainstream as it gets embraced by some of the biggest names on Wall Street — even some who were once its biggest critics.
Fink, who runs the world’s biggest money manager, falls into that category.
"I was a proud skeptic, and I studied it, learned about it, and I came away saying, 'OK, you know, my opinion [for] five years was wrong,'" Fink said earlier this year while discussing his previous views with CNBC.
Perhaps the best example of that shift came in June 2023 when BlackRock filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a spot bitcoin ETF. That was back when the crypto and asset management industries had little evidence such a product would be approved by SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
Yet it and 10 other money managers got the green light in January, followed by a listing on Jan. 12.
“BlackRock always seems to be in the right place,” Stephen Biggar, an analyst with Argus Research who covers the asset manager, told Yahoo Finance.
Its embrace of crypto (it also launched a smaller spot ether ETF in late July) coincided with an election year where pro-crypto congressional candidates received millions in industry donations and Trump, as a candidate, made a number of promises to the industry.