- Larry Fink's comments helped fuel the crypto rally this week.
- However, it wasn't the only huge news to hit the industry.
A version of this story appeared in our The Roundup newsletter on October 11. Sign up here.
Howdy! Ed here.
At first it sounded like an unimportant reminiscence, a casual reference to the good old days on Wall Street with little significance for crypto investors.
Hardly.
When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink compared Bitcoin’s evolution with that of the mortgage-backed securities market of the 1980s, well, the analogy electrified crypto — with crypto mavens offering fresh takes on why the cryptocurrency “will go higher fast”.
The mortgage bond market is a $11 trillion colossus, and the idea that digital assets would be mentioned in the same breath by one of the guys who helped build that pillar of the US economy was not on anyone’s bingo card.
As Liam Kelly reported this week, Fink’s comments move the market, especially when he muses on where cryptocurrencies are headed.
BlackRock, the world’s top investment firm, manages the biggest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, which sports more than $25 billion in net assets.
What was especially interesting about Fink’s comments, Liam wrote, was how unimportant regulation is to Bitcoin’s trajectory.
For the last three years, crypto has been obsessed with the machinations of Gary Gensler and the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and for good reason.
The agency’s crackdown could force the industry to fundamentally change how it operates.
Indeed, Joanna Wright reported this week how crypto players are “forum shopping” in the US court system to garner an advantage in their battle with the SEC.
But Fink, in a BlackRock earnings call on October 11, highlighted other forces driving Bitcoin’s growth: “analytics and data.” That’s what propelled mortgage bonds decades ago, and the same would happen with crypto, Fink said.
“I truly believe we will see a broadening of the market of these digital assets,” Fink said.
Bitcoin investors didn’t really need another reason to buy, but they got one anyway. The world’s top cryptocurrency surged another 11% in the last seven days and is approaching $70,000.
The last time Bitcoin crested that threshold was in June, and following a choppy summer the cryptocurrency is up 61% this year.
The market is getting so frothy that even the most exotic breed of memecoins are posting eye-watering numbers.
Aleks Gilbert chronicled the mad tale of GOAT, a coin based on an obscene meme that first went viral in the early ‘00s. It went from zero to $350 million in the space of days this week.
The mojo is rising.
It doesn’t matter if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins on November 5 for that to happen, the BlackRock CEO said.
In an exclusive interview, Sreeram Kannan described how the restaking protocol’s hot start was hard to handle.
Here’s who won’t be getting rich after Trump crypto project’s $450m token sale bombs
The Trump family’s crypto project launched this week, but Tim Craig reports that they may not get any money from it.
Post of the week
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen distanced himself from GOAT, the memecoin that took Solana by storm this week.
For clarity, I sent a personal $50K no-string-attached unconditional research grant to @truth_terminal and its creator @AndyAyrey this summer. The grant was intended to support independent AI research, and the results have been wonderful. However, I have nothing to do with the…
— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) October 16, 2024
Ed Robinson is DL News’ Story Editor. Got a tip? Email at ed@dlnews.com.
