BlackRock partners with Coinbase to give direct access to bitcoin

200
2
BlackRock partners with Coinbase to give direct access to bitcoin

The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, has partnered with Coinbase to give institutional clients direct access toBitcoin. The ongoing bear market has not stopped investors interest incryptocurrencies, as shown by the partnership. The shares of Coinbase went up by 14% immediately after the announcement.

Joseph Chalom, global head of strategic ecosystem partnerships at BlackRock, said in a statement: Our institutional clients are increasingly interested in exposure to digital asset markets and are focused on how to manage the operational lifecycle of these assets. The partnership will let them manage their exposures directly in their existing portfolio management and trading workflows. The announcement came the same week after Coinbase announced it is approaching 100 million verified user accounts. The platform now has 98 million authenticated users, 13,000 organizations, and 230,000 network partners in over 100 nations.

In March, BlackRock chairman Larry Fink wrote in a letter to shareholders that the firm is studying digital currencies, stablecoins and the underlying technologies as the firm has seen increasing interest from clients. Fink wrote that a global digital payment system can improve the settlement of international transactions and reduce the risk of money laundering and corruption.

In the past few months, BlackRock has been showing interest in cryptocurrencies. In April, we wrote about Blackrock after it joined Fidelity to invest $400 million in a tech startup and issuer of USDC stable coin Circle.

BlackRock is currently the world's most influential financial company with $9 trillion in assets under management as of June 2021. That is more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world, except for the US and China. We wrote extensively about BlackRock last year. Coinbase is a digital currency wallet and platform that allows merchants and consumers to transact with new digital currencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Since it was founded nine years ago, Coinbase has raised $847.3 million in funding over 14 rounds. Its latest funding was raised from a secondary market round on December 21, 2018.