BlackRock CEO: Tokenization Today Mirrors 1996 Web - We’re Just Getting Started
Larry Fink just drew a line in the sand. The BlackRock CEO's latest proclamation? The tokenization of financial assets is in its "seed stage"—a moment he equates directly to the dawn of the commercial internet in 1996.
The Inflection Point
Forget the hype cycles and the noise. This isn't about speculative crypto moonshots. Fink's framing points to a fundamental, structural shift. He's talking about the plumbing—the digitization of stocks, bonds, real estate, and funds onto blockchain rails. It's the quiet, backend revolution that promises to cut settlement times from days to minutes and bypass entire layers of costly intermediaries.
Why 1996 Matters
The analogy is deliberate and potent. 1996 was the year before Netscape's IPO went supernova, before Amazon sold its first book online. The infrastructure was clunky, adoption was niche, and most traditional businesses dismissed it as a fad. Sound familiar? Fink's comparison suggests we're on the same precipice. The foundational protocols are being built right now, largely invisible to the mainstream, while the old guard scrambles to understand the implications.
The Institutional On-Ramp
This isn't a fringe tech bro thesis anymore. When the world's largest asset manager starts talking seed stages, it's a signal flare to every CFO and treasury department on the planet. It means the capital and the credibility are arriving. The race isn't to buy the shiniest new token; it's to build the exchange, the custodian, and the regulatory framework that will host the next trillion dollars of digitized value.
A cynical finance jab? Of course. Wall Street has a long, proud history of monetizing every disruptive wave—first by fighting it, then by funding it, and finally by folding it into a fee-laden product you probably don't need. Tokenization will be no different.
The takeaway is stark. We aren't late to the party. According to the man managing nearly $10 trillion, we're just reading the invitation. The real build—and the real wealth transfer—starts now.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein say tokenization is approaching a breakthrough moment, comparing its current stage to the early Internet era. The executives argue that the technology could scale far faster than expected.
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