Arthur Hayes: Larry Fink and BlackRock Are Coming for Bitcoin & Crypto

According to BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes, traditional finance giants (TradFi) are quietly attempting to take over the Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto industries. Check out more details about all this below.

Hayes explains in a recent blog post that there is now a competition to determine who controls crypto, as legacy financial institutions are showing interest in the industry during the bearish market period, after many crypto companies have failed.

“What I’m trying to say is that crypto itself was never the problem – this issue is who owns it. Does it make sense now why banks and asset managers all of a sudden warmed up to crypto as soon as their competition was deaded?

They know the government is coming for their deposit base, and they need to make sure that the only available antidote to inflation, crypto, is under their control.”

He continued and said the following:

“TradFi banks and asset managers will offer crypto exchange-traded funds (ETF) or similar type managed products that give the client a crypto derivative in exchange for fiat cash.

The fund managers get to charge egregious fees because they are the only game in town that allows investors to easily sell fiat for a crypto financial return. If crypto in the coming decades can have a larger monetary systemic impact than the Eurodollar market, then TradFi can more than recoup their losses due to unfavorable banking regulations. They do this by becoming the crypto gatekeepers for their multi-trillion-dollar deposit bases.”

It is possible for financial institutions like Fi to overcome losses caused by unfavorable banking regulations by taking on the role of crypto gatekeepers for their multi-trillion-dollar deposit bases.

This could involve limiting in-kind redemptions of crypto products or requiring conversion to fiat currency for withdrawals or transfers, effectively keeping customers within the corporate banking framework.

According to a prominent crypto billionaire, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, may try to dominate Bitcoin’s consensus network and mining industry.

However, the bigger question is whether the industry can uphold the principles of Lord Satoshi when financial products worth trillions of dollars are parked within the fiat TradFi system.

Asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity may offer ETFs that track publicly listed indexes, but this raises concerns about their impact on Bitcoin Improvement Proposals aimed at enhancing privacy and censorship-resistance. Ultimately, it remains to be seen how the industry will evolve.