lackRock plans to tokenize trillions of dollars in assets!
Robbie Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, an institution with over $10 trillion in assets under management, shared BlackRock’s vision for tokenizing trillions of dollars in stocks and other assets in an interview with Bankless yesterday.
“It is a blueprint for a comprehensive transformation of financial infrastructure. Tokenization will promote efficiency, disintermediation, transparency and 24/7 transactions”
Here are the key interview highlights:
1. Institutionalization trend: Cryptocurrency is gradually becoming institutionalized, attracting more and more attention from large investors and regulators. Regulators are working hard to formulate regulations for digital assets to ensure their legitimacy and stability.
2. Beyond ETF Vision: BlackRock not only focuses on Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, but also values the huge potential of tokenized assets for financial infrastructure. Robbie emphasized that the tokenized financial system will bring advantages such as improved efficiency, reduced costs, enhanced accessibility, and system flexibility.
3. Differences in the appeal of Ethereum and Bitcoin narratives to institutions
Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative is more appealing to traditional, macro and allocation-oriented institutions
Ethereum’s narrative is more complex, and blockchain’s innovative narrative is more attractive to institutions that seek high returns and have more aggressive strategies.
4. The future of asset (stock) tokenization: The current focus of tokenization is on stable income instruments such as stablecoins and bonds, which has the potential to expand to a wider range of asset classes in the future, improve investment efficiency and reduce acquisition costs.
ETF is the assetization of tokens, and the subsequent asset tokenization will complement and integrate with each other.
5. Risk comparison and industry adaptation: Compared with a small investment in cryptocurrency, the risk of migrating existing financial assets to the blockchain is greater. Therefore, the industry needs to gradually adapt to and support the popularization of cryptocurrency and tokenization technology by building solutions.
For blackrock, compliance remains an obstacle to further promoting asset tokenization.
6. Value proposition of tokenization: The advantages brought by tokenization include enhanced liquidity, real-time settlement, 24/7 trading, transparency and interoperability, thereby improving financial inclusion and investment efficiency.
7. DeFi is both a future trend and a challenge for traditional finance. More people will use DeFi to manage their wealth completely independently. Traditional institutions need to actively and fully understand the challenges and opportunities of DeFi.
8. BlackRock has already carried out many innovative attempts, including in ETF issuance and with institutions such as Circle, and will continue to explore in this new field.
