BlackRock’s Bitcoin clients aren’t ‘underwriting’ the case for global payments

BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, said that most of the world’s largest asset managers’ clients aren’t considering Bitcoin’s use for daily payments when deciding whether to invest in the asset.

“I think for us, and most of our clients today, they’re not really underwriting to that global payment network case,” Mitchnick said during a podcast interview published to YouTube on Friday.

“That’s sort of maybe out-of-the-money-option-value upside,” Mitchnick said.

He said this doesn’t mean Bitcoin (BTC) won’t eventually achieve widespread use in payments, but he called that scenario “a little bit more speculative,” stressing that investors are far more focused on the “digital gold” or store-of-value thesis.

“A lot needs to happen” for that to change, says Mitchnick

“There’s a lot that needs to happen in terms of Bitcoin scaling, Lightning, and otherwise to make that possible,” he said. In August 2024, Galaxy Research suggested that most Bitcoin layer-2 scaling networks, particularly “rollups” may not be sustainable in the long term despite their popularity as a promising method to keep Bitcoin payments cheap, fast and decentralized.

Meanwhile, Mitchnick said that stablecoins have been “hugely successful” in the payments sector. “They do have massive product market fit as a payment instrument as a way of moving value around efficiently,” he said.

Robbie Mitchnick spoke to Natalie Brunell on the Coin Stories podcast. Source: Natalie Brunell

“Stablecoins have the potential to greatly expand where they are used today, going beyond just the sort of crypto trading ecosystem and DeFi to actually doing retail remittance payments, corporate, multinational, cross-border transactions, and capital market settlement activity,” he said.

He said Bitcoin has a better chance of competing in retail remittance payments than in other areas, but isn’t ruling anything out. “At some point it is possible, but it’s a more speculative thing to underwrite at this point,” he said.

Stablecoins are ‘scaling faster’ than expected

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood recently stated that stablecoins “scaling faster” than expected is the reason for her recent lowering her 2030 Bitcoin price prediction.

“Stablecoins are usurping part of the role that we thought that Bitcoin would play,” she said.

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Wood explained that she previously projected Bitcoin could reach $1.5 million by 2030, but with stablecoins now serving many of the use cases she thought Bitcoin would dominate, she said it may make sense to trim that forecast by about $300,000.

“I think emerging markets are huge in this regard and we’re starting to see institutions in the United States focused on new payment rails,” she said.

Tether co-founder Reeve Collins told Cointelegraph in September that he expects “all currency” to become stablecoins by 2030 as part of a broader shift that will see all forms of finance go onchain.

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