There is at least one Wall Street heavyweight in Larry Fink’s peer group who could care less about the BlackRock CEO’s evolving views on Bitcoin, and surprisingly, that person is the decidedly blunt Jamie Dimon.
Dimon, the CEO of financial giant JP Morgan Chase, has consistently ridiculed the world’s most popular cryptocurrency by market capitalization and spoke about digital assets during an interview with CNBC in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. I expressed my disgust once again. World Economic Forum.
“This is the last time I’m talking about this with CNBC, so please help me,” Dimon said in an interview with CNBC before bluntly answering a question about Fink’s views on Bitcoin. Considering that BlackRock launched a spot Bitcoin ETF last week. “I don’t care. So please stop talking about this.” He said.
He continued: “I don’t know what (Fink) will say about blockchain, about currencies that do something, about Bitcoin, which does nothing,” Dimon added.
Find common ground
While Dimon criticized Bitcoin, he expressed more support for blockchains that enable smart contracts. He gave the example of tokenization, a potential area of agreement with Fink related to the broader cryptocurrency space.
Last week, Fink said of the Bitcoin ETF:“It’s just a stepping stone towards tokenization, and I believe this is where we’re going.”
However, unlike Dimon, Fink was positive on both cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. He compared Bitcoin’s trajectory to the history of gold. “This is no different from what gold has represented for thousands of years,” he said.
In 2022, Fink called cryptocurrencies potentially transcendent. “It’s an international asset,” he said, speaking broadly about cryptocurrencies in a July interview with CNBC. “It has value that sets it apart from other asset classes, but more importantly, it will transcend any currency because it is so international.”
So far, BlackRock’s Spot Bitcoin ETF is one of the most popular ETFs in terms of trading activity, generating nearly $2 billion worth of volume over three days of trading, according to data from Yahoo Finance compiled by The Block.
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