Thursday, July 21st, 2022 | Cryptostotle #14 | By: Brad Lathrop
BlackRock, the giant multinational investment firm and the world’s largest asset manager, recently announced the launch of a “spot bitcoin private trust” available for U.S. institutional investors.
The move gives the investment company’s institutional clients exposure to Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($463,718,445,586 at the time of this writing).
BlackRock, in the company’s official blog post about the matter, had this to say:
“Despite the steep downturn in the digital asset market, we are still seeing substantial interest from some institutional clients in how to efficiently and cost-effectively access these assets using our technology and product capabilities.
Bitcoin is the oldest, largest, and most liquid cryptoasset, and is currently the primary subject of interest from our clients within the cryptoasset space. Excluding stablecoins, bitcoin maintains close to 50 percent of the industry’s market capitalization.”
The announcement also mentioned that BlackRock has “been conducting work in four areas of digital assets and their associated ecosystems where we see potential to benefit our clients and capital markets more broadly, including: permissioned blockchains, stablecoins, cryptoassets, and tokenization.”
BlackRock went on to state that the company is optimistic about “greater transparency to sustainable energy usage in bitcoin mining” in the future, as well as highlighting its newly formed partnership with cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase.
This comment is particularly interesting given that the environmental impact of bitcoin mining has been brought up frequently this year. In February, Kimbal Musk (brother of Elon and Tesla board member) was critical about bitcoin mining’s harmful effects on the environment.
During an interview with TechCrunch, Musk (speaking of Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin) said the move was “very ignorant” and that “we had no idea of the environmental impact, we literally didn’t know, we were like this seems like a good store of value and a good way to diversify assets.” Musk did make it clear that he didn’t “necessarily regret” the investment, and that he was hopeful to see positive change in the industry.
Bitcoin’s price currently stands at $24,112.
