Did BlackRock, Which Manages 17 Quadrillion Won, Really Invest in Bitcoin? Stop Being Misled

If you follow news about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, you’ll often see headlines about how major Wall Street asset managers and investment banks like BlackRock and J.P. Morgan have invested a certain amount in a given coin. Reporters writing these stories or YouTube crypto influencers will insist that “when conservative Wall Street institutional investors put money into crypto, it proves that cryptocurrencies are now accepted in the mainstream financial system.”

BlackRock is an asset manager that sells financial products, including the iShares ETF brand that Korean retail investors in the U.S. market are already very familiar with. When ordinary people hear “an asset manager that creates fund products,” they tend to picture active fund managers with eight monitors on their desks, tracking market moves in real time and trading to seize optimal opportunities. But today’s mega asset managers are built primarily around passive funds.

A passive fund, as the name suggests, is a fund that tracks a company or index that investors want exposure to. BlackRock is not taking client money and making investment decisions on their behalf; instead, it simply acts as a “money container” where clients, having made their own investment decisions, park their own cash. BlackRock does not earn performance fees on investment returns. It rents out the container and charges a management fee proportional to the amount stored in it. To use a simple analogy, it’s like charging a rental fee for a Lock&Lock food container at home based on the weight of the food you store in it.

According to BlackRock’s quarterly report, the firm managed $12.5 trillion as of the end of the second quarter of 2025. Multiply that by an exchange rate of roughly 1,400 won to the dollar and you get the headline-grabbing figure: the world’s largest asset manager, running about 1,700 quadrillion won.

From the attached table, you can see that retail (individual) and ETF products already account for $5.85 trillion, and even among institutional clients, index products make up $3.43 trillion. Excluding the cash management bucket, passive products represent 71.6% of the $11.5 trillion in AUM.

You might ask: if active funds still total $2.2 trillion, doesn’t that mean BlackRock is still making a substantial amount of investment decisions on behalf of clients? In reality, most of the funds classified as active are in fixed income products or in structured strategies that rebalance across asset classes according to a pre-disclosed logic. In other words, they are essentially structured financial products that mechanically implement what investors have asked for.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, which currently has about $93 billion (roughly 13 trillion won) in AUM, highlights the following key investment point at the very top of its product page:

The management fee is 0.25% per year. Apply that to 13 trillion won in assets, and you get about 325 billion won in annual management fee revenue. The reason BlackRock launches Bitcoin (or any other coin) funds is very simple: once investor demand is clearly proven, all it has to do is provide the container, and billions of won in revenue will flow in every year with little additional effort.

So how should we interpret the article below? I’ll leave that judgment to you.