“Tokenisation could advance at the pace of the internet—faster than most expect, with enormous growth over the coming decades,” Larry Fink, who leads the $10 trillion BlackRock, wrote in The Economist, suggesting the market could grow at the same pace seen by the world’s biggest technology companies in recent years.

“If history is any guide, tokenisation today is roughly where the internet was in 1996—when Amazon had sold just $16 million-worth of books, and three of the rest of today’s “Magnificent Seven” tech giants hadn’t even been founded.”

Tokenization, the processes of creating a crypto-based, digital version of real-world and financial assets, has been popularized on Wall Street by Fink.

“In the future, people won’t keep stocks and bonds in one portfolio and crypto in another,” Fink wrote. “Assets of all kinds could one day be bought, sold and held through a single digital wallet.”

Sign up now for CryptoCodex—A free crypto newsletter that will get you ahead of the market

Fink threw BlackRock’s weight behind a decade-long push to bring a fully-fledged spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) to Wall Street in 2023, calling it the first step towards a blockchain-based tokenized revolution that he believes will help democratize finance.

“Tokens that represent ‘real-world’ traditional financial assets (stocks, bonds and so on) remain a tiny share of global equity and fixed-income markets but are growing fast—up roughly 300% in the past 20 months,” Fink wrote, adding: “It started in 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous developer, launched bitcoin as a shared digital ledger that could record transactions without intermediaries.”

BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF has led the market since a dozen such funds were launched in early 2023, far outpacing the growth of gold ETFs and opening the floodgates for many other cryptocurrencies to get ETFs of their own.

Fink’s support for bitcoin and crypto helped legitimize the technology that was generally dismissed by large swathes of traditional finance and paved the way for U.S. president Donald Trump to embrace bitcoin and crypto in the run up the 2024 presidential election that returned him to the White House.

“At first it was hard for the financial world—including us—to see the big idea,” Fink wrote. “Tokenization was tangled up in the crypto boom, which often looked like speculation. But in recent years traditional finance has seen what was hiding beneath the hype: tokenization can greatly expand the world of investable assets beyond the listed stocks and bonds that dominate markets today.”