After Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, signalled its intention to be exposed to bitcoin, its initial investments in cryptocurrency have now been revealed.
According to the asset manager’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 31, Blackrock, through the Global Allocation Fund, completed 37 bitcoin contracts, worth $6.5 million.
These contracts expired on March 26. With this small investment in bitcoin futures contracts, Blackrock’s filing with the SEC shows us that the top asset manager has kept his promise to invest in bitcoin.
The 37 participating contracts covered approximately 0.03% of the company’s Global Allocation Fund. A small percentage, yet a huge beginning. Earlier in the year, Blackrock’s CIO Rick Rieder said his company had “started getting involved” in bitcoin. With this submission of documents to the SEC, Blackrock officially confirmed the beginning of its “involvement” with the cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, according to the aforementioned submission of documents to the SEC, it appears that Blackrock has under management (AUM) assets worth $9 trillion. It also seems to have increased its indirect exposure to bitcoin. Blackrock acquired more than one million of Microstrategy Class A shares, which is known to be one of the first large companies to add bitcoin to their balance sheet.
Blackrock has been researching the benefits of bitcoin in recent months, with Blackrock’s Russ Koesterich recently saying, “Gold’s ability to offset inflation has been somewhat exaggerated.” And despite cryptocurrency instability, Blackrock’s head of global fixed income investment services, Rick Rieder, stressed that “people are looking for value stores.”
