Wall Street gets laser eyes in bid for Bitcoin ETF bucks

livemint.com:

Listen to firms on Wall Street these days, and you might think you’re knocking down beers with a gaggle of crypto bros.

Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, told CNBC last month that he was a big believer in bitcoin. A few days later, Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, predicted that bitcoin would rally this year. He also praised Tether Holdings, the firm behind the widely used stablecoin tether.

“Holding a dollar in a token is amazing," Lutnick, whose firm manages much of Tether’s bond portfolio, said in a televised interview from Davos, Switzerland. In 2021, Tether’s creators reached a $41 million settlement with U.S. regulators over allegations that they misled investors about whether the coin was fully backed by dollars. Tether didn’t admit wrongdoing.

After years of tiptoeing around the world of cryptocurrencies, huge financial firms are racing to lure Main Street investors into these mostly unregulated markets, seeking a fresh source of revenue. The stampede has been prompted largely by January’s heavily anticipated launch of exchange-traded funds that directly hold bitcoin. Bitcoin proponents hope the ETFs will boost the price of the digital currency by opening it to a wider investor base, but many outsiders question whether these highly speculative assets belong in the average individual’s portfolio.

Some asset managers backing the new ETFs have flaunted their bitcoin bona fides on social media, dropping memes and lingo familiar to the crypto community, though perhaps obscure to everyone else.

For example, you might not know that Jan. 3 was the 15th anniversary of the first bitcoin transaction, but Invesco made it clear that it did: The