BlackRock sees AI, not a flood of new tokens, as crypto’s next big catalyst
BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, told attendees at the Digital Asset Summit in New York that big investors are increasingly treating crypto as infrastructure rather than a playground for countless new tokens. According to Mitchnick, client demand has narrowed sharply toward a few core assets—chiefly bitcoin (BTC $71,430.31) and ether (ETH)—as interest in smaller, short-lived tokens continues to evaporate.
“The turnover among top tokens has been pretty ferocious,” Mitchnick said, adding that many of the newer tokens “fail to hold long-term relevance.” He was blunt about the token glut: “The majority of that is nonsense,” he said, describing why clients are moving away from broad, diversified token baskets and instead concentrating allocations in the market’s blue chips.
But what could spark the next sustained bull run? For BlackRock’s digital-asset team, the answer is artificial intelligence. Mitchnick argued that AI is a bigger thematic force than digital assets themselves, and that the two trends naturally intersect. “AI agents are very unlikely to use, you know, Fedwire and SWIFT,” he said. “What is crypto? Crypto is computer-native money… AI is computer-native data and intelligence. And so there’s a natural symbiosis there.”
That framing reframes crypto from speculative tokens to pieces of computing and financial infrastructure. The market is already seeing that shift: a number of publicly traded bitcoin miners have begun allocating capital and data-center capacity to AI and high-performance computing workloads. Firms such as Hut 8 (HUT), Core Scientific (CORZ) and Iren (IREN) have announced efforts to repurpose facilities or sign hosting deals tied to AI demand—seeking steadier revenue streams alongside traditional mining operations.
Mitchnick also tied the AI-driven reshaping of industries to bitcoin’s appeal as a portfolio stabilizer. In times of technological disruption—when markets and business models are in flux—bitcoin can serve as a diversifier, he suggested, helping investors manage uncertainty while participating in the broader AI-driven economy.
In short, BlackRock’s message is twofold: the era of chasing every new token is fading, and the real tailwind for crypto may come from its practical role at the intersection of computer-native money and AI-driven computing needs.
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