Market News

BY  Billy Bambrough Senior Contributor

Bitcoin has suddenly shot higher, erasing $100 billion of losses from a crash that came amid fears the Biden administration could be trying to "kill" crypto.

The bitcoin price has rocketed 5%—pushing ethereum, XRPXRP 0.0% and the wider crypto market higher—after the Federal Reserve's decision to leave interest rates on hold and Fed chair Jerome Powell said he may soon be ready to begin cuts—forecasting three this year.

Before the Fed's closely-watched announcement triggered a bitcoin price pump, the world's largest asset manager BlackRock quietly revealed it's already begun the second stage in its plan for a crypto-based "revolution in financial markets"—something Citi analysts predict could could become a "$5 trillion market by 2030."

BlackRockBLK +1.9%, the world's largest asset manager that kicked off the rush to bring a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) to Wall Street last year, has quietly filed to launch a tokenized private equity fund in partnership with asset tokenization company Securitize.

BlackRock's IBIT spot bitcoin ETF has romped to $15.5 billion in assets under management in just three months, making it among the fastest-growing ETFs of all time.

The fund's documentation, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, did not specify which cryptocurrencies or assets it would hold. ONDO 0.0% Finance, which runs a real-world assets tokenization platform, saw the price of its ondo coin rocket 40% after news of the filing broke.

A cryptocurrency called BlackRock USD institutional digital liquidity fund (buidl) was created earlier this month on the ethereum blockchain, according to Etherscan data spotted by The Block.

The fund appears to have received a transfer of $100 million on March 4. Buidl has a maximum quantity of just 100 coins and only one holder.

In January, BlackRock's legendary founder and chief executive Larry Fink laid out this two-step plan for crypto in an interview with CNBC.

"We believe this is just the beginning. ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets," Fink said. "Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset."