Larry Fink Studied Bitcoin and Changed His Mind

Larry Fink Didn’t Get Orange-Pilled — He Studied Bitcoin and Changed His Mind

For years, Larry Fink was one of Bitcoin’s most vocal skeptics. He echoed the traditional talking points: concerns about money laundering, volatility, and lack of institutional maturity. But today, he leads the world’s largest asset manager into Bitcoin with IBIT — the most successful ETF launch in history.

So what changed?

According to Robbie Mitchnik, BlackRock’s Global Head of Digital Assets, it wasn’t a dramatic “orange-pill moment” or a single persuasive pitch. It was a slow, rigorous, research-driven shift — the kind you only see from a CEO who treats ideas seriously.

Mitchnik credits Fink directly:

“The credit is overwhelmingly with him for doing the work — being open-minded. Once he studied it, he got it in a deep way.”

Inside BlackRock, digital asset research intensified from 2018 onward. Infrastructure matured. Regulation advanced. Client demand exploded. Venture capital poured billions into institutional-grade Bitcoin rails. And geopolitical and monetary instability made Bitcoin’s core value proposition impossible to ignore.

Fink’s shift wasn’t ideological — it was analytical. He followed the evidence. He understood the macro landscape. And he saw that Bitcoin had moved from speculative curiosity to a global monetary contender.

This is the quieter truth behind his “conversion”:
Bitcoin survived every attack, every cycle, every skepticism. And the world’s biggest asset manager eventually had no choice but to take it seriously.

If anything, Fink’s journey reinforces a familiar pattern:
The deeper you study Bitcoin, the harder it becomes to dismiss it.

Listen to Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell & Blackrocks Robbie Mitchnick here: