Bitcoin and crypto prices have swung wildly this week as traders brace for U.S. president Donald Trump to drop a bitcoin price bombshell.
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The bitcoin price surged to an all-time high on Monday but has dropped back alongside Trump’s new memecoin.
Now, as fears grow of U.S. dollar crisis at the Federal Reserve, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink as revealed he’s had discussions with sovereign wealth funds about buying bitcoin and predicted such conversations could catapult the bitcoin price to $700,000 per bitcoin—which would give bitcoin a market capitalization of $14 trillion.
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BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink has become one of the loudest supporters of bitcoin and crypto … [+]
“If everyone adopted that conversation, it would be $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 per bitcoin,” Fink, who led the Wall Street rush into bitcoin and crypto last year via a fleet of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), told Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
BlackRock led a campaign to get a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) approved in the U.S. though 2023, with a fleet of bitcoin funds making their debut in January 2024 before surging to become some of the fastest growing ETFs of all time.
U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs broke $100 billion in net assets for the first time in November, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence, while BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) now has just over $60 billion in assets under management.
Fink warned that inflation fears have spurred interest in bitcoin, with governments ramping up spending and stimulus measures in recent years to combat the effects of Covid-era lockdowns.
“If you’re frightened of the debasement of your currency, you can have an internationally based instrument called bitcoin that will overcome those local fears,” Fink said.
Inflation surged in recent years, peaking at over 10% and forcing the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates at a historical clip, pushing up debt interest payments and fueling fears of a “death spiral” as Fed officials continue to grapple with a looming stagflation “nightmare” scenario.
Last year, BlackRock’s head of bitcoin and crypto said sovereign wealth funds are showing interest in bitcoin alongside wild speculation that Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund was exploring buying bitcoin.
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The bitcoin price has surged to over $100,000 in recent months, pushed on by Donald Trump’s election … [+]
“Many of these interested firms—whether we’re talking about pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, other asset managers, family offices—are having ongoing diligence and research conversations, and we’re playing a role from an education perspective,” Mitchnick said in May 2024, adding BlackRock has seen “a re-initiation of the discussion around bitcoin.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s plans to create a bitcoin reserve similar to the U.S. gold reserve or its oil stockpile has pushed bitcoin into the limelight.
In December, Trump confirmed he plans to establish a U.S. bitcoin strategic reserve. “We’re gonna do something great with crypto because we don’t want China, or anybody else … but others are embracing it, and we want to be ahead,” Trump told CNBC.
In July, then Republican candidate Donald Trump promised to create a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” and predicted bitcoin could eclipse gold’s $16 trillion market capitalization during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.
