Overview
- BlackRock, in Monday’s annual letter from CEO Larry Fink, made tokenized securities and digital wallets a core strategy and said it aims to move stocks and ETFs into wallets, though no product names or launch dates were disclosed.
- Fink said tokenization records asset ownership on shared ledgers so trades can settle faster and at lower cost, and he argued this could let more people invest using the same phone wallets they use for payments.
- The firm cited nearly $150 billion tied to digital markets, including about $65 billion of stablecoin reserves, almost $80 billion in digital-asset ETPs, and BUIDL, which it describes as the largest tokenized fund.
- Fink compared today’s stage to the internet in 1996 and urged rules for buyer protection, counterparty-risk controls, and digital identity checks to link traditional finance with public blockchains safely.
- He said the crypto business could generate roughly $500 million a year within five years, as BlackRock scales pilots like its BUIDL tokenized T-bill fund across multiple blockchains and integrates allowlisted trading via Securitize and UniswapX.