BlackRock’s tokenized fund is the largest in its category in the world.
Fink demands clear protections, identity verification and risk standards.
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $14 trillion under management, dedicated a central section of his 2026 annual letter to tokenization as a mechanism to expand access to financial markets.
In it document published this March 24, Fink suggests that Tokenization could reduce the barriers to entry that currently prevent millions of people from investing in assets that have historically been reserved for large investors.
Fink’s argument starts from a diagnosis of economic inequality. The letter points out that since 1989, a dollar invested in the US stock market has grown more than 15 times in relation to the value of a dollar linked to the average salary. Given this context, he identifies tokenization as a way for more people to participate in economic growth, not just observe it.
In the letter, Fink describes a concrete scenario: that a single regulated digital wallet can contain not only payment balances, but a wide range of financial assets.
In his words: “in a single wallet, someone could hold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), digital euros, tokenized bonds, and fractional interests in assets that were previously out of reach, from infrastructure to private credit funds.”
An update of the financial infrastructure
It is not the first time that Fink has spoken out on the subject. In January 2026, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, BlackRock CEO advocated accelerating tokenization on a “common blockchain” to reduce costs, friction and corruption, allowing instant movement of capital between assets.
This is a position that is now reinforced with this letter, deepening the company’s position and framing it in a broader context of financial democratization. In that sense, Fink describes tokenization as a systems update that support the current financial market.
“An upgrade to the plumbing of the financial system, making investments easier to issue, easier to trade and easier to access.”
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.
To illustrate the potential for mass adoption, he notes that half of the world’s population already has a digital wallet on your phone. It raises the question of whether that same wallet could also allow investing in a mix of assets for the long term, as easily as making a payment.
There are conditions for tokenization to work
Fink does not present tokenization as a process without conditions. Establishes that the model requires specific guarantees to build trust. It mentions clear buyer protections, strong counterparty risk standards and digital identity verification to manage the risks associated with illicit finances.
The goal, he writes, is that “people can trade and invest with the same confidence they have when swiping a card or transferring money.”
Regarding the regulatory framework, Fink considers that it is not about writing a completely new regulation for digital markets, but to update the existing one so that traditional and tokenized markets can operate together.
The investor describes the process as building a bridge from both sides of a river: on the one hand, traditional institutions, on the other, digital innovators such as issuers of stablecoins, fintechs and public blockchains.
The manager makes these points while involving BlackRock in the process. In September 2025, the firm announced its plans to advance the tokenization of its ETFs and real assets such as stocks and bonds. The goal is to expand the reach of products like its IBIT bitcoin ETF, which reached a record with 802,197 BTC under management (about $98 billion).
Hence Fink compare the current moment of tokenization with that of the internet in 1996: a technology that will not replace the existing system overnight, but whose gradual adoption could redefine the way people access, trade and benefit from global financial markets.
If the conditions that Fink sets out are met, tokenization could become one of the biggest opportunities for market democratization in decades. However, not everyone shares this optimism.
In an article published in Criptonoticias in December 2025, Mike Cagney, CEO of Figure Technologies, warns that “the market got drunk with the idea of tokenizing everything.”
For Cagney, the financial democratization narrative could be overstated: tokenization risks primarily benefiting traditional institutions, rather than truly opening up the markets to the common retail investor. He thus shares the idea that it is simply about digitize the same restricted access system under a new infrastructure.