BlackRock Digital Assets Head: Leverage-Driven Volatility Threatens Bitcoin Narrative

According to CoinDesk, BlackRock's head of digital assets, Robert Mitchnick, stated at the Bitcoin Investor Roundtable that the rampant leveraged speculation on crypto derivatives platforms is exacerbating market volatility and may undermine Bitcoin's long-term positioning as a stable institutional hedge.

Mitchnick pointed out that the fundamentals of Bitcoin as a "global, scarce, decentralized monetary asset" remain solid, but its short-term trading behavior increasingly exhibits characteristics of a "leveraged Nasdaq," which will significantly raise the threshold for conservative institutional investors to allocate to this asset.

Mitchnick also refuted the view that spot ETFs exacerbate market volatility. He noted that during a week of market turmoil, BlackRock's IBIT fund only experienced a 0.2% redemption; if hedge funds were to liquidate on a large scale, there should have been outflows in the billions of dollars, whereas the actual billions of dollars in liquidations occurred on leveraged platforms.