BlackRock has little interest in exploring cryptocurrency investment options beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to the company’s head of digital assets.

Robert Mitchnick, the company’s head of digital assets, said Bitcoin is the preferred cryptocurrency investment for BlackRock clients and they have little interest in acquiring other currencies.

The representative’s keynote was sobering for the blockchain industry, where many had hoped that the world’s largest asset manager would bring a wider range of crypto asset classes into the traditional financial world.

BlackRock customers love Bitcoin

As Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett reports, Mitchnick said that Bitcoin is “overwhelmingly” the No. 1 priority for BlackRock’s client base.

“Then a little bit of Ethereum and almost nothing else,” Mitchnick added on Friday at the Bitcoin Investor Day conference, a gathering of institutional capital allocators interested in Bitcoin.

While he acknowledged that the crypto community would like BlackRock to adopt other coins, he said “that’s not our focus.”

BlackRock launched its U.S. Bitcoin Spot ETF on January 11, joining nine other providers. Since that day, the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has become the most successful ETF to date, absorbing $13.3 billion in inflows and establishing itself as the most successful ETF offering in history.

When asked about Bitcoin’s role on Wall Street a decade from now, Mitchnick said:

“Ultimately, we expect that the advantages of older systems and new technologies will be merged into new financial infrastructure systems.”

What Wall Street thinks about Ethereum

The asset manager has also filed to launch an Ethereum spot ETF, following rivals like Grayscale and Fidelity. However, due to a lack of regulatory response to its application and recent investigations into the Ethereum Foundation, analysts predict that the application will not be approved anytime soon.

Even if approved, experts are skeptical that an Ethereum ETF will gain as much traction as its Bitcoin-based equivalent.

“Compared to spot Bitcoin ETFs, this is peanuts,” Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said of the issue earlier this month. "It's like the opening act after the big names."

A survey released by Bitwise in January found that 71% of investment advisors preferred Bitcoin to Ethereum.

That said, BlackRock has shown strong interest in real assets on the blockchain and plans to launch an institutional-focused tokenized asset fund in partnership with Securitize. #BlackRock #加密货币投资