Bitcoin is the first digital asset to be offered through the partnership, according to a blog post on the matter by Coinbase, the most popular U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, today. BlackRock’s Aladdin investment management platform will provide connectivity to Coinbase Prime, providing shared clients with cryptocurrency trading, custody, prime brokerage and reporting capabilities.
“Mutual clients of Aladdin and Coinbase will be able to manage their bitcoin exposure while managing their public and private investments to gain a portfolio-wide view of risk,” BlackRock wrote in an announcement.
The news marks a major shift for BlackRock, which chairman Larry Fink called bitcoin a “money laundering index” five years ago.
Since then, the asset manager has gradually made small inroads with Web 3.0, introducing bitcoin futures trading on its platform and across several of its funds last year. Fink told shareholders in a March letter that BlackRock was looking at “digital currencies, stablecoins and underlying technologies” to see how they could help the company serve its customers.
According to the company, Coinbase Prime currently has 13,000 institutional clients using its suite of tools. It remains unclear when the two companies plan to add other cryptocurrency products besides bitcoin to the platform.
It’s a big day for Coinbase. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced today that his company has added integrations with Coinbase’s wallet and other third-party cryptocurrency wallets to the Instagram platform. Shares of Coinbase have surged more than 17% as of 11:00 a.m. ET today, and they have also risen more than 70% in the past month, indicating that the company has begun to tumble from May when the cryptocurrency market fell to its trough. recovery from the lows.
Unfavorable cryptocurrency market conditions appear to have hit the exchange particularly hard, as it announced a hiring freeze and a round of layoffs this summer, the latter representing 18% of its workforce at the time. Its competitors have reacted differently to the “crypto winter” – Gemini has executed two rounds of layoffs in recent months, while Binance.US has been aggressively hiring new employees.
