Cathie Wood (캐시 우드), a well-known investor who leads Ark Invest, said a shift in stance by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is a signal widening institutional investors’ entry into the crypto market.

On May 5, blockchain outlet Cryptopolitan reported that Wood said on the podcast “The Rollup” that Fink’s break from bitcoin scepticism and his support for tokenisation is being received as an “entry permit” by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and large asset managers.

Wood pointed to BlackRock’s institutional platform Aladdin as the background. She said that if Fink stresses the importance of tokenisation, asset managers using Aladdin are also likely to move in the same direction. She explained that institutions tend to check signals from large traditional finance firms first when entering a new asset class.

BlackRock also said on X on May 4 that crypto investing is entering a new phase. The company said it discussed bitcoin’s role in portfolios at the LAIF26 event.

Fink’s shift in stance is also reflected in his past remarks and the current scale of the business. On Oct. 13, 2017, he called bitcoin an “index of money laundering.” But as of late April 2026, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust held about 810,000 BTC, and assets under management were tallied at about $62 billion. It is the world’s largest bitcoin fund and is three times larger than the second biggest.

In BlackRock’s 2026 annual shareholder letter, Fink addressed tokenisation in a separate section and said all financial assets, including bonds and private credit, would eventually move on-chain. He compared this period to the early days of the internet in 1996.

Institutional inflows also continued. Institutions accounted for about 38 percent of U.S. spot bitcoin ETF holdings, up from about 24 percent a year earlier. Total spot ETF assets under management were about $100 billion, with IBIT taking about a 49 percent share.

In the first quarter this year, IBIT recorded net inflows on 48 of 62 trading days. Net inflows totalled $8.4 billion even as bitcoin slid from the $90,000 range to the low $70,000s. Ark Invest first bought bitcoin in 2015 at about $250, when its market capitalisation was about $6 billion.

The combination of existing asset allocation infrastructure such as Aladdin and the tokenisation narrative showed that the inclusion of crypto is entering the institutional investment system.