The figures contrast with BlackRock’s broader business, which posted record assets under management (AUM) of $15.3 trillion after attracting $192 billion in net inflows during the quarter. The company also beat Wall Street expectations with adjusted earnings per share of $13.91 on $7.08 billion in revenue.
BLK shares traded 4.15% higher at £1,068 in pre-market trading Wednesday.
BlackRock’s crypto target
BlackRock is targeting $500 million in annual revenue from the business under its 2030 plan, the firm said in its earnings call.
This would represent an increase of more than tenfold, compared to the $40 million BlackRock currently generates in base fees and securities lending, accounting for less than 1% of the firm’s total fee revenue.
BlackRock has steadily expanded its crypto ETF lineup since listing its spot bitcoin ETF (IBIT) and spot ether ETF (ETHA), in 2024. More recently, the firm introduced the iShares Bitcoin Income ETF (BITY), which seeks to generate income by writing covered call options on bitcoin exposure, offering investors an alternative to simply tracking the cryptocurrency’s price.
The asset manager also manages $60 billion of Circle’s reserves, about one-quarter of the $300 billion stablecoin market, and wants to become the industry’s reserve manager of choice, it added.
BlackRock pointed to 5 billion crypto wallets as a new distribution channel for its traditional investment products during the earnings call.
South Korea plans to update its 76-year-old national asset management system to formally include virtual currencies and intellectual property in the country’s definition of national assets, according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s economic policy roadmap released Wednesday.
The proposal contemplates revising the National Property Act, which dates back to 1950, and includes plans to create a broader legal framework for managing state-owned assets. The ministry reiterated plans to start a pilot program for tokenized government bonds in 2027, saying blockchain technology has the potential to reduce transaction costs and speed up transfers.
Officials are also studying the tokenization of state-owned real estate to allow retail investors to participate and share in investment returns, according to the plan.
The announcement builds on South Korea’s broader push to bring blockchain into public finance. Earlier this year, the Finance Ministry said it would begin testing tokenized deposits for government spending in the fourth quarter. The Bank of Korea has already started trials of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) with commercial banks.
Decentralized lending protocol Aave has launched V4 on Avalanche, marking the first expansion of its latest lending infrastructure beyond Ethereum and setting the stage for future lending markets backed by tokenized real-world assets.
The deployment introduces Aave V4’s Hub & Spoke architecture, which allows specialized lending markets to operate with their own collateral requirements and risk parameters while drawing on shared liquidity across the protocol.
According to Aave, one of the first planned markets on Avalanche will support borrowing against tokenized assets.
The architecture is designed to support a broader range of collateral than previous versions of the protocol, Aave’s statement said. As well, future specialized markets on Avalanche could support tokenized assets including US Treasurys, money market funds, private credit and corporate bonds, each with customized collateral requirements and risk parameters.
Aave is the largest decentralized lending protocol by total value locked, with nearly $14 billion in assets across 23 blockchains, according to DeFiLlama data.
Source: DefiLlama
Related: Aave brings V3 lending and GHO stablecoin to Monad
Tokenized assets move beyond issuance
The launch comes as financial institutions and blockchain firms are fast building infrastructure and partnerships that allow tokenized assets to be used as collateral across traditional and decentralized finance.
In February, Franklin Templeton partnered with Binance to let institutions use tokenized money market fund shares as off-exchange collateral while keeping the underlying assets in regulated custody.
The following month, Nasdaq announced plans to integrate its collateral management platform with Talos’ digital asset infrastructure to streamline institutional workflows for managing tokenized collateral. The integration is intended to combine collateral management, risk monitoring and trade surveillance within a single platform for institutional digital asset trading.
Market infrastructure providers have also entered the space. In May, DTCC said it would integrate Chainlink technology into its tokenized collateral platform to support near real-time movement, valuation and settlement of tokenized collateral ahead of a planned fourth-quarter launch.
More recently, the push has expanded into institutional lending. On Wednesday, Grove announced a $500 million warehouse lending facility with Galaxy Digital to finance institutional crypto-backed loans using blockchain-based infrastructure.
Tokenized real-world assets have become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the digital asset industry. According to RWA.xyz, more than $34 billion worth of real-world assets are currently tokenized on public blockchains, up from about $12.8 billion a year ago.
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Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak said he is stepping back from leading the Base app after acknowledging that his bet on an onchain social economy failed to drive crypto adoption as he had expected.
The Base creator said he had spent the last two years betting that builders and onchain-native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini apps and creator coins, would fuel crypto’s next growth wave. But in a post on X on Wednesday, he said while developers did spur adoption through products like stablecoins, prediction markets and perpetual futures, social applications “disintegrated completely.”
“I was definitively wrong,” Pollak wrote, adding that Base’s focus on social left it behind competitors in key areas including trading, tokenization and payments.
As part of the pivot, Pollak said that the leadership of Base app will return to Coinbase, where popular crypto investor Jordan Fish, also known on X as ‘Cobie,’ will oversee its development. Pollak said Fish will work to make the Base app “the best damn app for onchain,” including expanding beyond the Base ecosystem, while Base itself will prioritize trading, payments and AI agents as it seeks to become infrastructure for global finance.
Clarity’s progress may hinge on what the president is willing to accept on the ethics section and whether he’ll support a bill that directly restricts his businesses. He’s urged Congress toward a Clarity Act passage, but he’s never explicitly addressed what he’s willing to sign into law when the restrictions are outlined for government officials.
White House spokespeople didn’t immediately comment on the meeting plans.
Recently, negotiations among senators from both parties were said to hit a wall over the conflict-of-interests provision, in which Democrats have demanded the president, vice president and members of Congress be restricted in their personal crypto ties. The disclosure from Trump that he’d made more than $1 billion from his industry involvement in 2025 added fuel for the critics.
On Tuesday, a few Democratic senators held a press conference to call for Clarity Act opposition if it doesn’t sever Trump’s “corrupt” ties to the sector. But that vocal group didn’t include Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who has been at the front of the Clarity Act ethics negotiation for months. Gallego, alongside fellow Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who both voted for the bill in committee, said in May that they would not support the bill’s final passage without an ethics provision.
Historically, bitcoin has exhibited relatively low correlations with traditional asset classes over full four-year crypto cycles. While those relationships have evolved as cryptocurrencies have become more integrated into financial markets through futures, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and ETPs, bitcoin has generally maintained diversification characteristics distinct from many traditional assets.
The question becomes more complicated when investors move beyond bitcoin. Ether and SOL are generally less liquid and more volatile than bitcoin. Since the start of 2026, ether and SOL have exhibited volatility approximately 35% and 44% higher than bitcoin, respectively. Diversification within crypto therefore often increases volatility. Whether that improves diversification depends on correlations. A volatile asset moving in the same direction as the rest of the portfolio may reduce diversification benefits, while one moving differently may enhance them.
Historically, SOL has acted as a better diversifier than ether. Over the four years through April 2026, bitcoin’s correlation with ether was 0.78. By contrast, SOL’s correlation with bitcoin was 0.72. Thus, SOL was slightly less likely to move in the same direction as bitcoin each week. More importantly, when SOL did not move in the same direction as bitcoin, it was historically less likely than ether to move in the same direction as other parts of a traditional portfolio, such as equities. SOL’s correlation with the S&P 500 Index was slightly lower than both bitcoin’s and ether’s. If historical correlations are any guide, SOL might act as a better diversifier than ether.
President Donald Trump plans to meet with a group of senators at the White House on Thursday afternoon to address the last major obstacle to the crypto market structure bill, according to people familiar with the plans that spoke to Politico and lawmakers involved in the talks.
The sticking point is the ethics section of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would restrict senior government officials from holding personal business interests in the crypto sector. Democrats have made such limits a condition of their support, in large part to address Trump’s own ties to the industry.
Negotiators have not reached a compromise, and the Senate calendar leaves a narrow window.
Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican in the negotiations, said the senators will brief the president on the bill and its “path to success.”
“We’ll be talking about the entirety of the bill. I mean, obviously the president’s been very engaged in this bill,” Moreno said. “He’s the one who’s really driven the innovation that I think will pay dividends.”
Trump’s crypto disclosures as the Clarity Act teeters
Clarity’s fate may hinge on what Trump will accept, and on whether he will support a bill that restricts his own businesses. He has pressed the Senate to pass the legislation, though he has not stated which conflict-of-interest terms he will sign into law. His disclosure that he made more than $1 billion from crypto involvement in 2025 gave critics fresh ammunition.
The bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote, with Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks joining Republicans to advance it. Both said in May they would not back final passage without an ethics provision. During the committee markup, an amendment from Senator Chris Van Hollen to bar the president, vice president and members of Congress from crypto business ties failed 11-13.
On Tuesday, a group of Democratic senators held a press conference to call for opposition to Clarity if it does not sever what they term Trump’s “corrupt” ties to the sector. Gallego, who has led the ethics negotiation for months, was not among them.
Timing on the revised text remains open. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican and a chief architect of the bill, said a draft could circulate as soon as Wednesday, but that senators were weighing whether to include the ethics language or bracket it for later.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he hopes to bring the bill to the floor before the work period ends August 7. Asked whether he would hold a vote absent a deal with Democrats, Thune said, “at some point, we’ll vote on it, yeah.”
The chamber breaks for its summer recess after the first week of August, which opens a narrow stretch to finish Clarity before members turn to the November midterms. Galaxy Research put the odds of passage at 50-50 as the clock runs down.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche faced backlash Wednesday over the Justice Department’s (DoJ) enforcement of crypto-related crimes and other actions as President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney appeared before a Senate hearing considering his nomination to lead the agency.
The ranking Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin, used part of his opening statement at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to criticize Trump’s AG pick for what he described as “dismantling DoJ’s enforcement team and shutting down ongoing criminal investigations of the crypto industry.”
Blanche was reportedly behind the disbanding of the Justice Department’s crypto enforcement unit in April 2025 as deputy attorney general.
Todd Blanche speaking at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Source: Associated Press
The Illinois lawmaker said that Blanche’s order dismantling the DoJ’s crypto unit enable Trump to earn $1.4 billion from his ties to the industry, including his family’s business World Liberty Financial.
He also accused former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao of “broker[ing] a deal to channel $2 billion” into World Liberty, which led to a presidential pardon. The former CEO agreed in 2023 to plead guilty to one felony charge related to the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regime at the exchange.
“Every smarmy, suspect deal in this administration has cryptocurrency behind the curtain,” said Durbin.
Senate Republicans need a simple majority of lawmakers present to confirm Blanche as AG should his nomination advance in the judiciary panel. With Senator Mitch McConnell still hospitalized after what his team described as a fall that led to pneumonia, the party has a slim 52-47 margin to confirm Blanche, who faces pushback over the DoJ’s actions on immigration and its crypto policies, claims that he would facilitate Trump’s attacks on perceived enemies and the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Related: Three US senators oppose CLARITY Act on ethics grounds with vote expected soon
Blanche also faced crypto-related questions from Republican Senator Thom Tillis who said he was “concerned that the Binance CEO got pardoned.” Blanche said that he would review the pardon process if confirmed.
Blanche signals DoJ shift on pursuing coders
The Trump AG pick was behind a 2025 memo “ending regulation by prosecution” in the crypto industry and previously held at least $159,000 worth of digital asset-related investments before divesting them to his children and grandchildren.
He has been serving as acting US Attorney General since Pamela Bondi’s firing in April, telling crypto holders shortly after his appointment that officials would not pursue cases into blockchain developers who were not responsible for illicit activity on platforms.
”[I]f you are developing software, if you are a coder, if you are part of that process and you are not the third-party user, and you are not helping and knowing the third party is using what you developed to commit crimes, you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged,” Blanche said at the Bitcoin 2026 conference.
The department still has ongoing cases against developers behind platforms allegedly used for illegal activities. Federal prosecutors are expected to retry Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Storm later this year after a jury failed to reach a verdict on two charges in 2025.
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Decentralized trading protocol Ostium paused trading Wednesday after blockchain security firms Blockaid and CertiK reported an apparent exploit of its OLP liquidity vault.
Blockaid estimated the exploit resulted in roughly $18 million in losses, while CertiK placed the figure at about $22 million. Both firms attributed the incident to an apparent compromise of Ostium’s oracle system, which supplies external price data to the protocol.
Source: Ostium
Ostium announced on X that it paused all trading after identifying an issue affecting the vault. It subsequently said: “With user security being our first concern, we recommend that all users temporarily revoke approvals for our contracts until we can further investigate the recent incident.”
The protocol said its team is investigating and has not yet confirmed the cause of the incident or the estimated losses reported by blockchain security firms.
Built on Arbitrum, Ostium is an onchain perpetuals trading platform offering leveraged exposure to 75 trading pairs spanning stocks, ETFs, commodities, indices, foreign exchange and cryptocurrencies.
Source: CertiKAlert
Related: Crypto hacks fell 47% in H1 but ecosystem is no safer: CertiK
DeFi hacks remain persistent challenge
The incident is the latest in a series of high-profile attacks targeting decentralized finance protocols this year, despite broader efforts to strengthen security across the sector.
According to DeFiLlama, crypto hacks resulted in nearly $630 million in losses during April, the highest monthly total since February 2025. DeFi protocols accounted for the vast majority of those losses, with exploits at KelpDAO and Drift Protocol making up more than 80% of the month’s total.
Security researchers have said recent DeFi attacks increasingly target offchain infrastructure such as oracle systems, privileged access and key management rather than exploiting flaws in smart contracts alone.
The attacks have also fueled concerns about DeFi’s readiness for institutional adoption. In an April research note, JPMorgan analysts said bridge security remains a key challenge for the sector, raising questions about whether DeFi can scale to support broader institutional participation.
Industry executives have warned that shrinking DeFi yields are making security risks harder to justify. Speaking to Cointelegraph in May, the CEO of smart contract security firm Statemind and Symbiotic co-founder, Misha Putiatin, said institutions increasingly struggle to quantify hack risk, making them less willing to accept the sector’s returns despite growing interest in blockchain-based finance.
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Investment giant Cantor Fitzgerald and cryptocurrency-focused broker-dealer Securitize (SECZ), are revamping initial public offerings (IPOs) with tokenization and blockchain technology, the companies said on Wednesday.
Under the agreement, Cantor will leverage its equity capital markets and trading capabilities, while Securitize will provide the tokenization infrastructure used to issue, distribute, and service tokenized securities, according to a press release.
Large traditional finance players are taking rapid steps towards the tokenization of capital markets. This week the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced further plans to tokenize stocks with a range of partners including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Vanguard.
The collaboration will enable public companies to raise capital and issue securities onchain with improved operational efficiency and modernized ownership records, while still operating within the established capital markets framework of traditional public offerings, the companies said.
Rather than focusing on tokenized funds or secondary trading, this partnership extends blockchain infrastructure directly into IPOs and follow-on offerings, a Securitize spokesperson said in an email.
