Could USD lose to BTC? BlackRock’s Fink says it’s possible

The word “bitcoin” appeared once in BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2024 letter to investors. 

The asset (and tokenization too) got a bigger shoutout this time around.

Fink’s sole mention of BTC last March came when bringing up BlackRock’s recent bitcoin ETF launch. That was part of a broader effort to “bring better liquidity and price discovery to more opaque markets,” he wrote.

The CEO’s 2025 letter, published today, included seven “bitcoin” references. He again addressed the aforementioned IBIT product, which has notched net inflows of $40 billion to date.

More than half of that demand has been from retail investors, Fink noted, with three-quarters of those investors never owning an iShares product before.

But more interestingly, Fink wrote there’s no guarantee that the dollar will forever serve as the world’s reserve currency.

“If the US doesn’t get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like bitcoin,” he explained.

He added: “Decentralized finance is an extraordinary innovation. It makes markets faster, cheaper and more transparent. Yet that same innovation could undermine America’s economic advantage if investors begin seeing bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar.”

Fink gives this warning while clarifying that he’s “obviously not anti-digital assets.” He has, after all, called tokenized securities “the next generation for markets.” And we’ve reported on BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, which earlier this month hit $1 billion in AUM.

Fink reaffirmed this sentiment, arguing that tokenizing every stock, bond and fund would “revolutionize” investing.

“Markets wouldn’t need to close,” Fink wrote. “Transactions that currently take days would clear in seconds. And billions of dollars currently immobilized by settlement delays could be reinvested immediately back into the economy, generating more growth.”

Solving for digital verification will be critical if tokenized funds are to become as familiar to investors as ETFs, he added. A TradFi giant like BlackRock continuing to focus on these categories should no doubt make such a thing possible.