Remember when the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager stood up and called Bitcoin “rat poison squared”? That was 2017, and the speaker was Larry Fink. Fast forward to December 2025 and the same man now oversees the biggest spot Bitcoin ETF on the planet. If that isn’t the fastest U-turn in modern finance, I don’t know what is.
Last week at the DealBook Summit, Fink sat next to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and basically laid out the blueprint for crypto’s next chapter. And honestly? It felt less like a debate and more like two guys who finally agree the train has left the station—only they’re arguing about who gets to drive it.
From Skeptic to Bitcoin’s Biggest Cheerleader
Fink didn’t dodge his past. He owned it completely. He told the audience that Covid was his wake-up moment. While the world locked down, he started meeting Bitcoin advocates, stress-tested his own assumptions, and realized he had been conflating Bitcoin with the entire chaotic crypto circus.
His new framing is fascinating: Bitcoin isn’t a growth asset. It’s an asset of fear. People buy it when they’re scared—scared of inflation, scared of geopolitical chaos, scared their government will debase the currency to pay yesterday’s bills. In Fink’s words, it’s digital gold with a darker psychological driver.
“I was wrong. There is now a big, large use case for Bitcoin.”
Larry Fink, December 2025
Brian Armstrong, unsurprisingly, pushed back on the “fear” narrative. He sees Bitcoin as proof that we’re moving toward an internet-native, decentralized financial system. To him, dismissing Bitcoin as a zero-value asset (à la Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) is like an old-school record executive laughing at streaming in 1999.
Why 2025 Feels Like the Real Turning Point
Both men agree on one thing: next year is when the regulatory fog finally lifts in the United States.
Armstrong was blunt. He believes we’re moving from “gray market” to “well-lit establishment.” The House already passed market-structure legislation with bipartisan support, and stablecoin rules are advancing fast. After years of SEC enforcement-by-headline, actual laws are coming.
- Stablecoin framework expected to pass Senate early 2026
- Clarity on custody rules for regulated institutions
- Potential licensing path for crypto exchanges operating onshore
- End of the offshore leverage casino that wiped out billions in October
Perhaps the most interesting tension came when the topic of political spending surfaced. Coinbase dropped roughly $50 million in the 2024 cycle—mostly through Fairshake—because, in Armstrong’s view, 52 million Americans were using crypto without clear rules. BlackRock, by contrast, splits donations 50-50 and obsesses over optics. Same goal—regulatory clarity—very different playbooks.
Tokenization: The Quiet Revolution Nobody’s Pricing In
If Bitcoin is the fear trade, tokenization is the efficiency trade—and Larry Fink is all in.
Imagine every financial asset—stocks, bonds, real estate, private equity—living on-chain, settling in minutes instead of days, with programmable rules and fractional ownership baked in. Fink believes this will strip out trillions in friction costs and democratize access in a way index funds never could.
Right now there’s already $4.1 trillion sitting in stablecoins and digital wallets. Think about that number for a second. That’s cash looking for a home, ready to flow instantly into tokenized versions of anything.
“The ability to move from tokenized cash into tokenized assets through an app will radically simplify investing.”
Armstrong went further on the banking angle. He basically accused traditional banks of regulatory capture—using rules to protect their deposit monopolies and avoid paying competitive yields. His prediction? Within two years those same banks will be begging to issue their own interest-bearing stablecoins.
America Is Late to the Party
One of the more sobering moments came when Fink admitted the U.S. is falling behind. Countries like India and Brazil have already built real-time payment rails and digitized government services. Their financial plumbing is newer, cleaner, and frankly more innovative.
Tokenization isn’t just about Wall Street efficiency—it’s becoming a national competitiveness issue. If the U.S. drags its feet, other jurisdictions will capture the infrastructure layer of tomorrow’s economy.
The AI Parallel Nobody Wants to Talk About
Fink dropped a subtle but chilling data point: BlackRock’s revenue is up roughly 40% in recent years while headcount grew only 5%. Margins expanded 300 basis points. Translation—technology is doing more with fewer people, fast.
He tied it directly to tokenization and AI. The same forces letting asset managers run leaner balance sheets will let entire economies run with less human friction. Whether that’s net positive or creates massive displacement is the question nobody on stage wanted to answer directly.
Governance, Prediction Markets, and the Weird Ideas
Armstrong floated something wild toward the end: what if we allowed insider trading on prediction markets? His argument—if the goal is better information aggregation, maybe strict price-purity rules are holding us back.
Fink, meanwhile, daydreamed about tokenized stocks enabling instant shareholder voting through apps. No more proxy fights controlled by three big index providers. Every retail investor gets a direct voice. The implications for corporate governance are enormous.
Even the Coinbase headquarters move from Delaware to Texas got airtime—Armstrong called Delaware courts hostile to founders, while Fink stayed diplomatically neutral (classic BlackRock).
What This All Means for Regular Investors
Strip away the stage lights and you’re left with two simple takeaways:
- Bitcoin has graduated from speculative toy to institutional portfolio allocation—whether you like the “fear asset” label or not.
- The next bull market won’t just be about price; it will be about infrastructure. Whoever builds the rails—tokenized settlement, stablecoin networks, on-chain identity—wins the decade.
We’re moving from the “wild west” era of crypto into something that looks suspiciously like the plumbing of global finance. And the guys who once represented opposite poles—Wall Street titan and crypto insurgent—are now reading from surprisingly similar scripts.
Maybe that’s the real story. When Larry Fink and Brian Armstrong start agreeing on the destination, you can be pretty sure the rest of the world is about to follow—whether regulators are ready or not.
In my view, the most underpriced part of all this isn’t Bitcoin’s price action. It’s the second-order effects when $4 trillion in stablecoins meets instant settlement meets programmable ownership. We’re not just digitizing money. We’re digitizing trust itself.
And once trust becomes code, the old gatekeepers—banks, brokers, even governments—suddenly have a lot less control than they’re used to. That’s the part that still keeps me up at night, in the best possible way.
