Larry Fink now calls Bitcoin ‘digital gold’ after once calling it ‘an index of money laundering’

Bitcoin's rise from an obscure digital asset to the heart of Wall Street has had an unlikely backer: Larry Fink, the BlackRock CEO who eventually came around to Bitcoin's promise — and its enormously lucrative potential.

The Observer recently traced Fink's seven-year evolution, from calling Bitcoin "an index of money laundering" in 2017 to recognizing its "digital gold" characteristics years later, just before his firm turned Bitcoin into one of its fastest-growing investment products.

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Of course, Bitcoin has a long history of winning over its critics.

Even Michael Saylor, the Bitcoin bull who transformed Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, into the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, was once a skeptic. In 2013, Saylor famously declared that Bitcoin's "days are numbered." Today, Strategy holds more than 845,000 BTC on its balance sheet, according to BitcoinTreasuries.NET .

For Fink, the epiphany may have been driven partly by Bitcoin's appeal as a "debasement trade" — a scarce asset investors can turn to when they're worried about currencies losing purchasing power. But the business opportunity was impossible to ignore.

In January 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) alongside 10 other spot Bitcoin ETFs, giving investors a regulated and familiar way to gain direct exposure to Bitcoin's price without having to buy or custody the cryptocurrency themselves.

As CoinDesk reported , the fund reached $70 billion in assets in just 341 trading days, making it BlackRock's biggest fee-generating ETF. When Bitcoin surged above $126,000 last October, IBIT briefly approached $100 billion in assets, reaching that threshold five times faster than any ETF in history, according to Bloomberg.

Wall Street access doesn't eliminate Bitcoin risk

While IBIT made it easier for investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin — and helped broaden its appeal beyond crypto's traditional base — it didn't insulate them from the asset's notoriously volatile swings.

That became painfully clear this year. By June, Bitcoin had fallen below $60,000 , marking a roughly 53% decline from its October peak.