Tokenizing Real World Assets: Financial Giant BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Backs Ethereum ETF

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (BLK), backed the notion of an ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) a day after the much-anticipated bitcoin (BTC) ETF went live.

“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 several 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. IBIT accounted for roughly $1 billion of the total $4.6 billion of trading volume that the ETFs collectively saw.

The asset management giant may now be looking to list an equivalent product for the native token of the Ethereum blockchain as part of its ongoing journey toward tokenization. Tokenization is the term for representing assets (real word or digital) in the form of a token on the blockchain.

Fink believes tokenization can eliminate matters related to money laundering and other corruption. Fink also said he did not see cryptocy as a cy but as an asset class, referring specifically to bitcoin as “an asset class that protects you” against fears of 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.”