Bitcoin breaks $100,000 again, and the biggest driver behind it isn't the community, but the financial behemoth of Wall Street – BlackRock.
On May 8th, BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, saw net inflows of $6.97 billion year-to-date, surpassing the world's largest gold ETF, GLD, marking the full launch of the "digital gold" era. IBIT not only ended GBTC's monopoly but also accelerated the entry of traditional capital into the Bitcoin market.
But IBIT is just the prologue.
In 2024, BlackRock launched the on-chain money market fund BUIDL, with a TVL that has now exceeded $2.8 billion, ranking first in the RWA sector. It has also completed the on-chain mapping of $150 billion in traditional assets, covering real estate trusts, commodities, and more. On-chain finance is no longer a fringe experiment but a new battlefield for traditional capital.
All of this stems from BlackRock's 40-year financial ambition. From ETFs to the Aladdin system, from fixed income to global asset allocation, BlackRock has always been shaping the rules of the game. Its ETF product iShares manages over $3.3 trillion in assets, and the Aladdin system has become the risk control core for 200+ institutions, serving assets worth $20 trillion, and is known as the "operating system of the market."
Now, BlackRock is replicating this capability to the Web3 world. CEO Larry Fink clearly stated in his 2025 letter to shareholders that tokenized assets will be key to reshaping financial infrastructure and may even challenge the global dominance of the US dollar. For him, SWIFT is the postal system, while tokenization is email – efficient, disintermediated, and globally circulating.
The Bitcoin ETF is just the entry point.
In the on-chain world, BlackRock is targeting not just asset liquidity, but also the power of discourse, infrastructure, and the rules themselves. The real big players are never just about "buying Bitcoin," but about rewriting the underlying code of the financial future.