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Since Blackrock accelerates its expansion in digital assets in 2025, the difference between bitcoin and ether in institutional adoption has become increasingly clear. In an interview with the empire PodcastSamara Cohen, First Administrative Director and Empire ETF and Index Investments in Blackrock, presented a rare window on how the world’s largest asset manager sees the largest encryption assets – and why Bitcoin stands decisively in Ethereum in the customer’s demand and wallet integration.
The historic Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is a pivotal moment in the company’s digital asset strategy. “These are the three things,” Cohen said, referring to the factors that led to the launch of Bitcoin product. “But it has already started with the investment thesis and the customer asked the market structure and clearly prepared the organizational background.” Cohen stressed that before any organizational light, Blackrock’s decision was rooted in the strong desire of investors to reach Bitcoin as part of the various portfolios.
IBIT was not the first step of Blackrock in Bitcoin. In 2022, the company provided a special box for bitcoin for institutional customers, a decisive internal milestone. “We did not get my actual bitcoin work until we launched this institutional product in 2022,” Cohen explained. “This was a very important institutional moment for us to rest only with work and risk management and systems.”
Bitcoin demand was wider and deeper than many expected. IBIT has become the most successful ETP launch in History, a fact that Cohen partially attributed to a previously undesirable part of investors. “On a large scale, about half of the IBIT holders are currently what we call the self -existing investors,” I noticed. “For 3/4 of these residents, they created a mediation account in some cases and bought the first ETP because they wanted Bitcoin on the ETP cover.”
Bitcoin opposite. ethereum
This is in a sharp contradiction with Ethereum, where Cohen’s tone was more cautious. While Blackrock also launched ETHEREUM, the demand was less powerful. “Ethereum is still far away,” she said when discussing the institution of institutional investor. Unlike Bitcoin, which is increasingly seen as a potential value of value and various assets category, the ETHEREM investment thesis has not yet hesitated at the institutional level.
Cohen was placed in the face of complexity institutions when evaluating Ethereum. She said, “You may be really upward on the general interest of Ethereum Blockchain, but you don’t know how to translate this into value accumulation into the original symbol,” she said. This uncertainty complicates the issue of adoption is broad. Although Bitcoin as a “without border store” is relatively clear, the ETHEREUM mode is still more famous, technological benefit intertwined with questions about the symbolic economy, competition and long -term market dynamics.
Besides the narrative gap, Cohen defined a more structural obstacle: the general lack of CRYPTO data and standards. “Crypto has a large scale problem in data and standards,” she said. When drawing comparisons with traditional markets, Cohen emphasized that standards such as cash flow, governance and team transparency – critical ingredients for stock investment – are largely absent or inconsistent through most of the encryption assets. “If you think about indexing basically as an organized market technology, how does this task perform encryption now?” I asked the speech, with a highlight of how constituent standards appeared even in the leadership of ecosystems for encryption.
In contrast, Bitcoin’s adoption is backed by a clearer standard about its scarcity, release schedule, and maturity of the market infrastructure, which makes it easy to place traditional wallet models. Cohen confirmed that Blackrock recommends that Bitcoin allocate a 1-2 % for investors who are asking for exposure, rooting a detailed analysis of the risk contribution to the governor. “If it exceeds 2 %, the additional contribution to the overall wallet fluctuations increases significantly.”
While Ethereum continues to take technological steps-especially in decentralized financing applications and applications on Blackrock, at least at the present time, the fact that institutions require clarity, unification and evaluation models well defined before making a meaningful capital. Cohen also summarized, “Understanding how to create an ETHEREUM evaluation framework or any other symbol that becomes more complicated.”
At the time of the press, BTC was traded at $ 95,120.
Distinctive image created with Dall.e, Chart from TradingView.com
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