The move underscores how traditional Wall Street financial players are expanding further into cryptocurrencies and related technologies, even after the slump in these assets this year. Bitcoin has lost around half its value in 2022, while the collapse of the Terra ecosystem and Three Arrows Capital have raised questions about the resilience of the market and prompted increased regulatory scrutiny.
Coinbase is facing an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into whether the company allowed Americans to trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities. BlackRock chose to partner with Coinbase due to its scale in the market and its role in providing world-class trading, custody, brokerage and information capabilities. The services will be available to customers of both companies.
“Our institutional clients are increasingly interested in having exposure to digital asset markets and are focused on how to efficiently manage the operational life cycle of these assets,” Joseph Chalom, global head of ecosystem partnerships, said in the statement. BlackRock’s strategic
Institutional investors accounted for about three-quarters of the $309 billion of trading volume on Coinbase in the first quarter, the company reported in May. Coinbase clients include hedge funds, corporate treasuries, and asset managers.
“Coinbase’s partnership between BlackRock and Aladdin is an exciting milestone for our company,” Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, and Greg Tusar, vice president of institutional product, said in a separate statement. “We are committed to driving the industry forward and creating new hotspots as institutional adoption of crypto continues to rapidly accelerate.”
For BlackRock, the partnership is the next step in a broader strategy of expanding into digital assets. Its CEO, Larry Fink, said in March that the company was looking into the growing importance of digital assets and stablecoins and how they can be used to help customers. The following month, the company joined a group of investors in Circle Internet Financial, the issuer of USD Coin, and said it would seek to act as the lead manager of the stablecoin’s cash reserves.