Larry Fink’s $59 Billion Change of Heart

In October 2017, Larry Fink stood before a banking-industry audience and reduced bitcoin to five words: “an index of money laundering.” The BlackRock CEO has had plenty of company over the years. Warren Buffett told CNBC the decentralized digital currency was “probably rat poison squared”; JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a nonproductive “pet rock”; Nobel laureate economist Eugene Fama said the odds of bitcoin going to zero within a decade were “close to one” on the Capitalisn’t podcast. Fink now calls bitcoin “digital gold.” 

It’s a pretty stark pivot—until you look at the cash bitcoin funds are taking in. By the end of August, bitcoin traded near $78,000, U.S. bitcoin funds just closed their best month of 2026 with about $3.3 billion in fresh money, and the group’s combined assets briefly topped $100 billion for the first time. Roughly three of every four of those new dollars ran through one product: BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (ticker: IBIT).

The plainest wrapper in finance

In June 2023, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager, now overseeing a record $15.3 trillion—filed for an exchange-traded fund to hold actual bitcoin. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved it the following January, only after a federal appeals court ruled against the agency in a challenge brought by Grayscale that effectively forced the SEC’s hand. In short, Fink took one of the most volatile assets, sealed it inside the plainest wrapper in finance, and gave top institutions a way to buy in without ever touching crypto itself. The day after trading started, Fink told CNBC the ETFs were “step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets,” with tokenizing “every financial asset” as step two. By the time 60 Minutes sat Fink down last October, he framed his evolution on the subject as a response to market reality. Fink told Lesley Stahl that “the markets teach you, you have to always relook at your assumptions.”