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Is It Ethereum? BlackRock CEO Wants ‘One Blockchain’ For Tokenization

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink used the World Economic Forum stage to argue that tokenization wants to maneuver from pilot applications to market plumbing and instructed {that a} shared blockchain customary may lower prices and even “scale back corruption,” a framing that instantly reignited the “which chain?” debate throughout crypto and particularly contained in the Ethereum neighborhood.

Fink didn’t title a community. But the mix of BlackRock’s onchain product footprint and its personal analysis positioning makes Ethereum probably the most pure candidate for the “one frequent blockchain” he alluded to, even when he stored it implicit.

Fink’s remarks, delivered within the language of infrastructure reasonably than crypto evangelism, leaned closely on the operational case for digitized property and interoperable settlement rails.

“I feel the motion in direction of tokenization, decimalization is critical. It’s ironic that we see two rising international locations main the world within the tokenization and digitization of their forex, that’s Brazil and India. I feel we have to transfer very quickly to doing that.”

He then pushed the argument past funds and into capital markets: “We could be decreasing charges, we’d do extra democratization by decreasing extra charges if we had all investments on a tokenized platform that may transfer from a tokenized cash market fund to equities and bonds and forwards and backwards.”

The most provocative line was his name for standardization and the trade-off he implied comes with it. “[If] we’ve got one frequent blockchain, we may scale back corruption. So I might argue that, sure, we’ve got extra dependencies on possibly one blockchain, which we may all speak about, however that being stated, the actions are most likely processed and safer than ever earlier than.”

Why Ethereum Is Coming Up

In the summary, “one frequent blockchain” may very well be learn as a generic attraction for shared rails. In follow, BlackRock’s public-market crypto lineup and its tokenization work have concentrated round Bitcoin and Ethereum.

On the ETF aspect, BlackRock’s flagship US spot merchandise monitor bitcoin and ether — iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) — with ETHA launching in 2024 and now sitting within the middle of the agency’s public-facing Ethereum publicity.

On the tokenization aspect, BlackRock’s first tokenized fund, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), debuted on Ethereum by way of Securitize in March 2024, making Ethereum the unique issuance community for what has turn out to be one of many market’s most intently watched institutional RWAs.

While BUIDL has expanded across multiple networks over time, the important thing level for Fink’s “frequent blockchain” framing is that Ethereum has been BlackRock’s default place to begin for public-chain issuance, a significant sign in a market the place “requirements” are likely to observe whoever already has the deepest liquidity, the broadest integration floor, and probably the most conservative counterparties.

The stronger inform got here this week from BlackRock research reasonably than Davos soundbites. In its 2026 thematic outlook, BlackRock explicitly floats the thought of Ethereum because the infrastructure layer that collects the “toll” as tokenization scales. One slide asks: “Could Ethereum symbolize the ‘toll street’ to tokenization?” and provides that stablecoin adoption could also be an early proxy for tokenization “in motion,” with “blockchains like Ethereum” positioned to learn.

In the identical part, BlackRock cites RWA information “as of 1/5/2026” and notes that “of tokenized property 65%+ are on Ethereum,” underscoring the community’s lead in right this moment’s tokenized-asset stack.

At press time, ETH traded at $3,005.

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