BlackRock’s head of digital assets spoke about the asset manager’s view on the Ethereum network and financial products tied to its native token.
BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, described the firm’s Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) as a “tremendous success” but acknowledged a key limitation. Speaking on March 20 at the Digital Asset Summit, he noted that the ETF is “less perfect” without staking, highlighting a crucial feature absent from the current offering.
“A staking yield is a meaningful part of how you can generate investment return in this space,” Mitchnick said. “And all the [Ether] ETFs, of course, at launch did not have staking. So, if that is able to get resolved…”
However, adding staking to Ether ETFs is no simple task, according to Mitchnick. “It’s not as simple as a new administration just green-lighting something, and then boom, we’re all good, off to the races,” he said. “There’s a lot of fairly complex challenges that have to be figured out, but if that can get figured out, then I think it’s gonna be sort of a step change upward in terms of what we see the activity around those products is.”
