BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is leading the campaign for regulatory approval of the spot Bitcoin ETF. The firm is taking advantage of a marked shift in sentiment and a sense that the views of regulators are more or less aligned with its own.
That’s the view of Martin Bednall, a BlackRock veteran, who spoke on a panel at the 2023 CCData Digital Asset Summit in London on Tuesday.
BlackRock Has Come Around on Bitcoin, Former Exec Believes
Bednall, a BlackRock managing director in London from 2000 to 2013, is now CEO of Jacobi Asset Management, which launched the first spot Bitcoin ETF in Europe in September. It is now listed on Euronext Amsterdam.
During the Tuesday panel discussion, he described a shift in sentiment in the asset management market. And, specifically, on the part of his former firm.
In past years, BlackRock’s current CEO Larry Fink was not a believer in cryptocurrency, Bednall said. Rather, Fink shared the view, still common in some quarters, that crypto was shady and a tool for money laundering.
But that is no longer Fink’s view, or the market’s, Bednall argued. Bednall described a long evolution of BlackRock’s views on the role of Bitcoin and the spot Bitcoin ETF specifically.
Thanks partly to the outcome of high-profile legal battles in the United States, BlackRock has come to view the product much more favorably, he said. Bednall and others on the panel referred to Ripple’s victory over the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last July. Along with Grayscale’s more recent successful petitioning of the SEC.
“The mood music has definitely changed, from th
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Author: Michael Washburn