A day after the highly anticipated bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) became live, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink supported the idea of an ether (ETH) ETF.
“I see value in having an Ethereum ETF,” Fink said in an interview with CNBC on Friday. “These are just stepping stones towards tokenization and I really do believe this is where we’re going to be going.”
BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) was one of the few such products to make its trading debut in the U.S. on Thursday after the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) approved the funds on Wednesday.Of the $4.6 billion in trading activity that the ETFs experienced overall, IBIT accounted for about $1 billion of it.
As part of its long journey toward tokenization, the massive asset management company might now be trying to offer a product that is comparable to the Ethereum blockchain’s native token.
The process of representing assets—digital or real—into tokens on a blockchain is known as tokenization.Fink thinks tokenization can resolve issues with corruption and money laundering.Additionally, Fink stated that he did not view cryptocurrencies as a form of money but rather as an asset class, citing bitcoin in particular as “an asset class that protects you” against concerns about geopolitical risk.
“It’s no different than what gold represented over thousands of years,” he said. “Unlike gold, we’re almost at the ceiling of the amount of bitcoin that can be created.”