BlackRock’s Robbie Mitchnick: AI, Not New Tokens, Is the Bigger Long‑Term Force for Crypto
At the Digital Asset Summit in New York, BlackRock’s Robbie Mitchnick argued that artificial intelligence will have a far larger and more durable impact on crypto than the continuous launch of new tokens. Speaking to CoinDesk’s coverage, Mitchnick said institutional investors are increasingly narrowing their crypto allocations around a few core assets rather than spreading exposure across broad altcoin baskets.
Why institutions are concentrating
Mitchnick pointed to short token life cycles and limited long‑term utility as the reason for the shift. “The majority of that is nonsense,” he said, characterizing most circulating tokens as fleeting. Token turnover among the top ranks has been “pretty ferocious,” he added, with Bitcoin and Ethereum emerging as the only tokens preserving long‑term relevance.
He described BTC and ETH as occupying complementary “monetary universes”: Bitcoin functions as a savings‑style hedge, while Ethereum serves as productive infrastructure for on‑chain activity and tokenization.
AI as the structural catalyst
Rather than viewing consolidation as a failure, Mitchnick framed it as a natural evolution driven by the rise of AI. He argued that autonomous AI agents will prefer “computer‑native” rails over traditional financial plumbing: “AI agents are very unlikely to use, you know, Fedwire and SWIFT (…) What is crypto? Crypto is computer‑native money… AI is computer‑native data and intelligence. And so there’s a natural symbiosis there.”
Miners and infrastructure pivoting to AI
The shift is already visible in the market for compute. A growing number of Bitcoin miners are reallocating capacity toward AI workloads, seeking steadier revenue from model training and inference demand. Publicly traded firms such as Hut 8 (HUT), Core Scientific (CORZ) and Iren (IREN) are converting data centers or signing hosting agreements to support AI and high‑performance computing, while others are exploring similar strategies even as traditional mining stays core to their business.
What it means for the market
If BlackRock’s thesis holds, the long‑term winners won’t be the next “AI coin” that captures headlines, but the core crypto stack—Bitcoin, Ethereum and the tokenization rails—that autonomous agents and institutional plumbing actually rely on. Long‑tail token churn is likely to remain transient and speculative, while persistent upside accrues to the assets that underpin real‑world, AI‑driven activity.
Cover image: Perplexity. BTCUSD chart: TradingView.
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