Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have rallied this week, riding a wave of good news for the cryptocurrency market.
The bitcoin price jumped to over $45,000 per bitcoin after a senior Russian official said the country would accept bitcoin as payment for its energy exports. In the meantime, ethereum price has continued to rise as โexcitementโ builds ahead of a long-awaited upgrade.
Now Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with around $10 trillion in assets under management, has said his company is "looking into" digital currencies due to growing customer demand.
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"As we see growing interest from our clients, BlackRock is looking at digital currencies, stablecoins and underlying technologies to understand how they can help us serve our clients," Fink wrote this week in a letter to BlackRock shareholders.
Fink has previously dismissed bitcoin and crypto, saying in a CNBC interview last year that he doesn't see much demand for crypto. In February, coindesk reported BlackRock was preparing to follow other Wall Street giants including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citi into crypto services, and plans to allow clients to borrow from BlackRock by pledging crypto assets as collateral.
This week, Goldman became the first major US bank to trade crypto over the counter, working with crypto merchant bank Galaxy Digital to offer a bitcoin-linked instrument called a non-deliverable option.
Fink, who called bitcoin a โmoney laundering indexโ five years ago, pointed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and far-reaching financial sanctions imposed on the country as a catalyst for mainstream crypto adoption.
"The war will prompt countries to reassess their currency dependencies," Fink wrote. "Even before the war, various governments were seeking to play a more active role in digital currencies and define the regulatory frameworks under which they operate."
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The war in Ukraine has also disrupted the world order that has existed since the end of the Cold War, according to Fink, who predicted that it will "end the globalization that we have experienced in the last three decades."
โIt has left many communities and people feeling isolated and looking inward,โ he wrote. "I think this has exacerbated the polarization and extremist behavior that we're seeing in society today."
Fink's comments echo others in the financial world who see Russia's tough sanctions, which have included excluding the country's banks from the SWIFT interbank messaging service and restrictions on central bank foreign exchange reserves, as a system reorganization.
In March, a Credit Suisse analyst said that the Russian war in Ukraine will create a new world financial order that could drive up the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
"We are witnessing the birth of Bretton Woods III, a new world (monetary) order centered on commodity-based currencies in the East that is likely to weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West," Zoltan Pozsar, Director overview of the short-term interest rate strategy at the giant investment bank, he wrote in a report.
