Original Article Title: "Bitcoin's Biggest Booster, BlackRock's Crypto Ambition"

Original Article Author: Nancy, PANews

A news piece about "BlackRock's IBIT seeing more inflows this year than the world's largest gold fund" came as Bitcoin reclaimed $100,000 on May 8, becoming the market's focus. With Bitcoin ETF picking up the baton from the crypto community, Wall Street has become a key buyer of Bitcoin, driving the mainstreaming and regulatory compliance of this once fringe asset, also becoming a crucial piece of BlackRock's global financial landscape.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, oversees assets of up to $11.5 trillion. However, this "ostensible asset management giant" has long transcended the role of an asset manager. BlackRock, known as the "shadow central bank," deeply participates in shaping global capital flows, policy orientations, and the construction of systemic financial tools.

From IBIT to BUIDL, BlackRock's On-Chain Layout

In the traditional financial order, BlackRock has long been a player controlling the rules of the game. Today, this financial behemoth is quietly bridging the gap between traditional capital and digital assets, attempting to reshape the future financial order.

Over the past decade, one of the unresolved core issues in the crypto market has been "When will the US SEC approve a Bitcoin spot ETF?" In pursuit of this, dozens of institutions have come forward, only to hit a wall time and again. It wasn't until June 2023 that BlackRock officially submitted a Bitcoin spot ETF application, which was not just an application but also a catalyst for market confidence. The market quickly realized that when even BlackRock joined the Bitcoin camp, regulatory approval was only a matter of time.

In January 2024, the SEC officially approved multiple Bitcoin spot ETFs, including BlackRock's IBIT. This event not only became a "watershed for Bitcoin compliance" but also meant a redistribution of narrative power: BlackRock used an ETF to bring Bitcoin onto the mainstream financial stage. After the launch of IBIT, it quickly attracted a massive amount of institutional funds, not only ending Grayscale's GBTC monopoly on Bitcoin exposure but also surpassing the world's largest gold ETF, GLD, in capital inflows.

According to publicly available data, IBIT has garnered approximately $6.97 billion in net inflows since the beginning of this year, surpassing GLD's $6.29 billion during the same period. Despite Bitcoin's modest 1.4% increase during this period and gold's 24.9% rise, funds have flowed contrarily into IBIT, demonstrating the market's high recognition of its long-term allocation value.

Bloomberg's Senior ETF Analyst, Eric Balchunas, pointed out that the continuous inflow of funds during a price weakness phase validates Bitcoin's value as "digital gold" in asset allocation. He expects that within 3-5 years, the BTC ETF's AUM will reach three times that of the gold ETF. Strategy Chairman Michael Saylor made a bolder prediction, stating that BlackRock's IBIT will become the world's largest ETF within ten years.

However, IBIT is just the starting point in BlackRock's broader picture. Rather than simply promoting an ETF, BlackRock is reshaping a new financial infrastructure centered around tokenization.

In March 2024, BlackRock launched the tokenized money market fund BUIDL, becoming its first fully on-chain operated traditional asset fund. By May 2025, BUIDL's TVL had surpassed $2.8 billion, leading the global RWA race by a wide margin, far ahead of competitors like WisdomTree and Franklin Templeton. This also signifies that BUIDL is no longer an experimental project but a market-validated reality.

Furthermore, BlackRock recently applied to establish DLT Shares and announced the completion of the on-chain mapping of $150 billion in assets, covering diverse areas such as Real Estate Trusts and commodities. This case not only marks the commercialization and scaling of RWAs but also propels on-chain finance from an experimental edge to an extension of traditional capital markets.

The Comeback of Wall Street's Underdog

Perhaps everything can be traced back to an office in Manhattan in 1986.

That year, Larry Fink was a rising star trader on Wall Street and the youngest Managing Director in First Boston's history, leading the cutting-edge financial innovation of the time—Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO). However, a misjudgment in an interest rate bet led to his company losing over $100 million, plunging his career into a nadir. This financial Waterloo, in turn, sparked a profound reevaluation of risk management in him, sowing the seeds for BlackRock's future rise.

Two years later, with the support of former comrades at Blackstone, Larry Fink established BlackRock Financial Management, the predecessor of BlackRock, with an initial capital of only $5 million. Unlike the prevalent high-frequency trading and speculative arbitrage trend on Wall Street at the time, Larry Fink made risk management the core philosophy. This philosophy later became the underlying logic and moat for BlackRock's global asset management dominance.

With deep insights into the fixed income market and an innovative asset management approach, BlackRock quickly emerged as a key player. By the end of 1994, BlackRock's assets under management (AUM) had surged from its initial $1.2 billion to $53 billion, leading to its official spin-off from Blackstone Group and subsequent rebranding to "BlackRock," marking the beginning of its true global expansion.

BlackRock solidified its core moat not just through asset size but through its groundbreaking financial risk analysis platform — the Aladdin system. This risk management and asset allocation analysis platform is hailed as the "super brain" of the global capital markets, conducting over 5,000 portfolio stress tests daily and 180 million option adjustments weekly. In 2022 alone, Aladdin generated up to $1.4 billion in revenue for BlackRock. More importantly, Aladdin has now become a critical global financial infrastructure, with over 200 major financial institutions worldwide, including Swiss Bank, Deutsche Bank, Swiss National Bank, and even the Federal Reserve, using Aladdin for risk control and asset allocation management. It services assets totaling over $20 trillion, nearly equivalent to one-fifth of the global GDP. In a sense, BlackRock's influence has transcended that of traditional asset managers, making it a "prediction engine" for global market sentiment and fund flows.

Furthermore, BlackRock has also gained a dominant position in global capital allocation through its ETF business. After the burst of the 2008 real estate bubble, the market urgently needed a transparent, cost-effective, and liquid investment tool, and ETFs quickly became a crucial choice for institutions and retail investors seeking risk diversification and asset efficiency. Subsequently, in 2009, BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors (BGI) from the UK for $13.5 billion, obtaining the world's largest index fund brand, iShares ETFs.

ETFs are not only passive investment tools but also channels for international capital allocation rights. Those included in an index gain liquidity, and BlackRock has become the creator and arbiter of this global capital game. According to official disclosures, iShares ETFs' assets under management have reached $3.3 trillion, managing over 1,400 ETFs, covering almost all major global markets. Through ETFs, BlackRock has gradually infiltrated the shareholder structures of nearly every large publicly traded company in the United States. Data from 2023 shows that, including BlackRock, the Big Three index funds are the largest single shareholders of over 90% of S&P 500 index companies, becoming the "invisible hand" in the US corporate equity structure.

"Revolving Door," BlackRock's Secret Weapon in the Capital Game

What truly brought BlackRock into the global public eye was its role as the "central bank behind the scenes" in various financial crises. In particular, during the 2008 global financial crisis, as Lehman Brothers collapsed and AIG faced bankruptcy, the entire financial system was on the brink. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve urgently needed an external professional institution that understood asset pricing and could handle clearance operations. BlackRock took on this hot potato, not only assisting in asset liquidation but also helping the Fed design the largest-ever asset rescue plan, TARP.

Since then, BlackRock's role has evolved from being just a player in the market to becoming a bridge for policy execution. In 2020, the global markets plummeted again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal Reserve once again called upon this "old friend" and, unprecedentedly, intervened directly in the market through ETFs. The entity carrying out this action was BlackRock's iShares series of funds, a move that critics argued showed BlackRock's relationship with the U.S. government was "overly intimate." BlackRock can be seen as both a private market giant and a government-trusted policy execution tool.

Behind this lies a more secretive system: the revolving door between government and industry.

In the past, many senior BlackRock executives moved on to hold key positions in U.S. government agencies such as the Treasury and the Fed after leaving, and some former government officials have joined BlackRock after their government roles. This intertwining relationship between government and industry often implies a front-foot advantage in asymmetric information, providing BlackRock with a unique edge in its global strategic positioning.

BlackRock's reach now extends far beyond the financial sector. In recent years, it has been continuously expanding into energy, data, healthcare, logistics, and even ports, the major economic arteries. Recently, BlackRock proposed a $22.8 billion acquisition of Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Ports, comprising 43 port projects. If the deal goes through, BlackRock will become one of the actual controllers of the world's largest port network, involving over 100 key nodes and will have a more profound impact on the global economy's operation. According to The Wall Street Journal, such transactions have even received tacit or explicit support from the U.S. government. In other words, BlackRock is no longer just a market participant but a participant in great power games.

BlackRock's story is not just a success story on Wall Street but a textbook example of how capital penetrates power, shapes market rules, and influences the future in the age of globalization. It does not create news but creates rules; it does not govern directly but influences fiscal policy; it does not own companies but is the largest shareholder behind almost every company. This invisible giant's presence has long seeped into every corner of our lives.

Due to its high sensitivity to global financial trends and systemic impact, BlackRock was among the first to perceive the structural changes brought about by crypto assets. "If the U.S. cannot control the ballooning debt and fiscal deficit, the U.S. dollar's decades-long status as the 'global reserve currency' may eventually give way to emerging digital assets like Bitcoin." BlackRock CEO Larry Fink bluntly stated in his 27-page annual investor letter in 2025, mentioning that tokenization is becoming a key force in reshaping the financial infrastructure. If SWIFT is likened to postal services, tokenization is the email itself - assets can flow directly and in real-time, bypassing all intermediaries. Tokenization will make investment and returns more "democratized." This might not be a bold vision of the CEO but a sober judgment of the future financial sovereignty landscape.

In the world of blockchain, BlackRock's attempt to dominate is not only about liquidity, but also about setting standards, building infrastructure, and connecting with regulation. As history has always shown, BlackRock's intention is not merely about "how much assets to invest," but whether it can establish the rules of the next generation of finance.

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