BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, said that most clients of the world’s largest asset managers do not consider using Bitcoin for daily payments when deciding whether to invest in assets.
“I think for us, and for most of our clients today, they don’t really take responsibility for that global payment network case,” Mitchnick he said during a podcast interview posted on YouTube on Friday.
“That may be the advantage of the out-of-the-money option,” Mitchnick said.
He said that doesn’t mean Bitcoin (BTC) won’t eventually achieve widespread use in payments, but he called that scenario “a bit more speculative,” stressing that investors are far more focused on the “digital gold” or store-of-value thesis.
“A lot has to happen” for that to change, Mitchnick says
“There’s a lot that needs to happen in terms of scaling Bitcoin, Lightning and everything else to make that possible,” he said. In August 2024, Galaxy Research suggested that most Bitcoin Layer 2 scaling networks, especially “aggregate” networks, may not be sustainable in the long term despite their popularity as a promising method for maintaining cheap, fast and decentralized Bitcoin payments.
Meanwhile, Mitchnick said stablecoins have been “very successful” in the payments sector. “They have a huge market offering of products as a payment instrument as a way of moving value efficiently,” he said.
“Stablecoins have the potential to greatly expand where they are used today, going beyond just the crypto-trade and DeFi ecosystem type to actually doing retail remittances, corporate, multinational, cross-border transactions and capital market settlement activities,” he said.
He said Bitcoin has a better chance of competing in retail remittance payments than in other areas, but isn’t ruling anything out. “At some point it’s possible, but at this point it’s more of a speculative thing to take,” he said.
Stablecoins are ‘scaling faster’ than expected
CEO of ARK Invest, Cathie Wood recently stated that stablecoins are “scaling faster” than expected is the reason for her recent lowering of her 2030 Bitcoin price prediction.
“Stablecoins are usurping some of the role we thought Bitcoin would play,” she said.
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Wood explained that she had previously projected that Bitcoin could reach $1.5 million by 2030, but given that the stablecoin now serves many of the cases that she thought Bitcoin would dominate, she said it might make sense to lower that forecast by about $300,000.
“I think emerging markets are huge in that sense, and we’re starting to see institutions in the United States focused on new payment rails,” she said.
Tether co-founder Reeve Collins told Cointelegraph in September that he expects “all currencies” to become stablecoins by 2030 as part of a broader shift that will see all forms of finance connected to the chain.
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