BlackRock is committed to providing clients with access to their choice of investment opportunities and has launched a spot bitcoin private trust. The trust is available to U.S. institutional clients and seeks to track the performance of bitcoin, less expenses and liabilities of the trust. Despite the steep downturn in the digital asset market,1 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. 2
BlackRock is encouraged that organizations such as RMI and Energy Web are developing programs to bring greater transparency to sustainable energy usage in bitcoin mining, and will follow progress around those initiatives.
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 recently announced a partnership with Coinbase that will provide common clients of Aladdin and Coinbase access to the digital assets trading lifecycle through connectivity between Coinbase and the Aladdin platform, starting with bitcoin. Leveraging Coinbase’s comprehensive trading, custody, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities, common clients will be able to manage their bitcoin exposures alongside their public and private investments.
Source: BlackRock
