rewrite this title BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Says Bullish Bitcoin Adoption Could Push Price to $700K – Decrypt

BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink said that the price of Bitcoin could jump as high as $700,000 when speaking on artificial intelligence and crypto in a conversation with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Fink sat alongside Peng Xiao, CEO of UAE-based artificial intelligence company G42, when the conversation about AI turned to crypt. Xiao indicated that he believes crypto is the currency of AI, while Fink said it’s a hedge against inflation and pessimism about what’s happening in the world.

“As I became a student of crypto, it was very clear to me that crypto is a currency of fear,” said Fink. “But that’s OK. If you’re frightened of the debasement of your currency, or the economic or political stability of your country, you can have an international-based instrument called Bitcoin that can overcome those local fears.”

He shared a similar sentiment last July, suggesting that Bitcoin was an investment for those “frightened of the world.”

But it’s an investment that many are considering making, including the operators of a sovereign wealth fund that Fink met with while in Switzerland earlier this week. Fink said they were debating whether to have a 2% or 5% allocation to Bitcoin.

“If everybody adopted that conversation,” he said, “it would be $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 for Bitcoin.”

However, Fink cheekily told the audience that his words were not intended as a promotion of Bitcoin.

Fink and BlackRock have become deeply intertwined with crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum thanks to their spot ETF offerings for both assets, which have experienced billions in inflows during the last year. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, or IBIT, eventually grew large enough to overtake its gold ETF in assets under management. 

Bitcoin is down 2.5% in the last 24 hours to $104,000, after setting a new all-time high price of $108,786 on Monday.

Edited by Andrew Hayward