BlackRock’s head of digital assets says he is seeing broader enthusiasm for the use case of stablecoins.
BlackRock has many Bitcoin exchange traded products (ETP), with around $70 billion in assets around the world, Robbie Mitchnick said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg Monday.
“So that’s been a pretty extraordinary story, having started just in January of 2024 when we launched the first… the resonance that this has had with investors of all types, so talking about retail investors, institutional, wealth advisors, (it) has been pretty extraordinary,” he said.
Stablecoins are a type of crypto asset designed to maintain a value relative to an asset, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mitchnick said the emergence of Bitcoin made it possible to move value around the world in real time at a near zero cost for the first time.
“Now we’re seeing huge traction in that use case from stablecoins, which are in various ways a better fit for the purpose of day-to-day money movement transactions,” he said.
“There’s still a little bit of value transfer happening through Bitcoin, but the majority of it’s similar to gold, where there’s a little bit of usage of it in sort of industrial applications, but the majority of it is being held as the store of value asset.”
BlackRock launched the iShares Bitcoin ETF in mid January on the CBOE Canada Exchange, trading under the symbol IBIT.
“So basically, what this is doing is giving Canadians ability to hold through that same value proposition of Bitcoin exposure and the convenience of an ETP, but now in a Canadian listed product on CBOE Canada,” he said.
Mitchnick added that BlackRock’s Investment Institute recommended earlier this year that allocating about one to two per cent of a portfolio to Bitcoin is a “reasonable range” for investors looking to get exposure in that area.
