Larry Fink famously said that blockchain will be the future of funds, but the immediate project the team at BlackRock [profile] is working on is a little more traditional. CoinDesk reported on Thursday that BlackRock is preparing to file with the SEC to create a Bitcoin ETF. The publication cited only a "person familiar with the matter."

Laurence D. "Larry" Fink BlackRock Chairman, CEO

The article also reported that Coinbase would be the custodian for the ETF and would provide spot pricing for the fund. Whether the ETF would invest in futures or spot Bitcoin was not reported by the publication. Currently the SEC has only approved ETFs that invest in crypto futures. Numerous filings for spot crypto ETFs have been filed with the SEC by multiple fund sponsors, but so far none has won SEC approval. Grayscale has also taken the SEC to court in a bid to force the regulator to allow it to convert its Bitcoin Trust — which does invest in spot — into a registered ETF.

BlackRock officials did not immediately respond to comment on the possible plans for the ETF.

CEO Larry Fink told attendees at a New York Times conference last year that tokenization is the next generation for markets.

"I believe that the next generation for markets, the next generation for securities, will be tokenization of securities," Fink told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Summit last December. "And if we can have that distributed ledger that we know every beneficial owner, every beneficial seller. We all have our code of who is buying, who is selling ... instantaneous settlement. And think about it, it changes the whole ecosystem. You don't need trust banks."

While Franklin Templeton has launched a tokenized money market fund and WisdomTree has created a still unlaunched family of tokenized mutual funds, BlackRock itself has yet to make a filing for a tokenized mutual fund product. 

Edited by: Sean Hanna, Editor in Chief


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