BlackRock stays bullish after the leverage washout
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said on CNBC he is very bullish on markets over the next 12 months, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto. He brought up crypto himself. His main point: there was too much leverage in Bitcoin and crypto, held by too many leveraged players. That excess has been flushed out, so there is more stability at current levels. He worried about this leverage before, which is why the washout happened. Across the wider capital markets, he does not see much hidden leverage relative to the scale of capital today, though pockets of it still exist.
His bullishness rests on technology. He expects the tech revolution to lift profit margins for more companies. BlackRock's own margins rose by 260 basis points over the last 12 months, largely from using more technology.
The tokenization plan
BlackRock recently laid out a vision of crypto and traditional finance merging. The firm is bullish on the underlying assets and on the technology itself. Its CFO said the goal is for investors to never leave their digital wallets while moving money across crypto, stablecoins, and long-term stocks and bonds. BlackRock aims to eventually offer tokenized long-term investments: treasury funds, iShares ETFs, and even private markets. It calls crypto and tokenization a pure organic growth opportunity.
Fink has long backed tokenization and Ethereum as the rail for tokenizing the world. He sees value in an Ethereum ETF as a stepping stone toward tokenization. The technology to tokenize exists today. His argument: if you pair a tokenized security with a tokenized identity, the moment you buy or sell an instrument it is known and recorded on a shared general ledger built together. He claims this eliminates corruption and wipes out money laundering.
Competition and the ETF race
Rivals are preparing during the bear market for the next bull run. Morgan Stanley has filed for spot Ethereum and spot Solana ETFs, with fees set very competitively against BlackRock. This only became visible because firms must make public disclosures as they gear up to launch. The takeaway: just as many assume the opposite, crypto is not going away and is here to stay for years and decades.
The Clarity Act fight
Prediction markets show a 50/50 chance the Clarity Act passes this year. Fewer than 25 days remain. The Senate must clear it before summer recess; the deadline is August 7th.
Three major disputes hold it back: stablecoin yield, developer liability, and ethics/insider trading. Three Democratic senators are threatening to block the bill unless new ethics rules stop public officials from personally profiting from crypto. I agree that rule is worth backing, and it looks like a big holdup. Trump says all his crypto profits were made before he took office, and he has divested the ones his sons run. Trump was set to meet US senators the next day to discuss the Act, a day before a Friday hearing where crypto's leading voices would again tell Congress why the US must support the industry and pass clarity.
At that hearing, industry figures argued the US should be the top destination for digital assets. Good market structure would make US best practices the global standard, letting America set the pace rather than filling gaps left by others. Digital assets were also framed as a source of innovation that can push US dollar usage worldwide through stablecoin legislation. There is speculation of up to $2 trillion in demand for US government securities from digital assets over the next few years.
If the Clarity Act fails, the fallback is agency rulemaking, which is good enough for now. The SEC, CFTC, and Fed are already making rules, and those rules would be hard to unwind. The Act would simply codify them, and that codification can happen much later. Passage is wanted but not essential; failure would not be the end of the world.
On-chain strength and Ethereum's growth
Ethereum's staking ratio hit 33.7%, meaning more than one in three ETH is off the market and circulating supply shrinks daily. Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer 2, jumped from $3 million to $323 million in total value locked in two weeks. Top protocols there include the Robinhood app plus Ethereum blue chips like Morpho, Ethena, Uniswap, and Curve.
Outside Bitcoin, Ethereum is the base layer for much of what is built in crypto. Tokenized assets on chain, at zero a few years ago, now total $30 billion, forecast to grow 100x over the next four to five years.
Global adoption and the market bottom
Japan, the world's fourth largest economy, officially passed a bill to legalize Bitcoin and crypto and is on a path to cut crypto taxes from 55% to 20%. South Korea made crypto part of its national assets and made crypto and crypto financial products legal.
Bitcoin sat just under $65,000 at the time of recording. Signs point to a bottom being in. A large amount of old Bitcoin came online and moved on chain in 2024 and 2025, a scale matched only by 2017. That great distribution is mostly over, and 2026 is on pace to see less than half as many awakened coins as last year. With fear in the air, governments are happy to buy cheap.
Coinbase's head of institutional investing, John D'Agostino, said blockchain and crypto can solve the problem of AI deepfakes. Over 40 countries have committed to buying Bitcoin in some form for national balance sheets or otherwise. He sees a daily flood of new institutional investors. People without inside access wait for a grand event, but insiders see steady growth even when headlines do not match it.
Chart read
Past strong resistance has turned into current strong support, possibly Bitcoin's largest accumulation region in history. A lower low is still possible in October if the four-year cycle keeps playing out. The setup looks bullish, and the plan stays the same: dollar-cost average through the summer. The Bitcoin bear market is almost over, and the next three months matter for anyone trying to make money in crypto.
