How to Value Bitcoin? BlackRock CEO Explains

In an interview on Thursday, Jay Jacobs, Head of U.S. Equity ETF at BlackRock, told CNBC that Bitcoin should be valued as "a non-correlated asset that benefits as the world becomes more chaotic." "In the long run, cryptocurrencies will decouple from U.S. tech stocks," Jacobs said, emphasizing that short-term market tensions may obscure the differences but "the long-term correlation between U.S. stocks and Bitcoin is like two or three percent." He argued that what drives stocks higher—"higher growth, more certainty, lower geopolitical risks"—is a reflection of the forces affecting Bitcoin. "Bitcoin thrives when you have more uncertainty and are looking for something that will behave differently, so essentially, they will act as a non-correlated asset." BTC was trading below $94,000 at the time Jacobs appeared, extending the bull run that has increased by about 150% since spot ETFs were approved at the beginning of last year. Bitcoin Increases in Price Thanks to "Super Forces" Jacobs links price behavior directly to cash flows. "We think that in the long run, if this larger unstable trajectory continues worldwide, things like gold and Bitcoin will continue to rise." He noted that investors are repositioning accordingly: "We have seen significant cash inflows into gold ETFs; we have seen significant cash inflows into Bitcoin, and all of this is because people are looking for assets that will behave differently." The biggest beneficiary is the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) of BlackRock, which on April 23 absorbed 643 million dollars in net inflows - the largest one-day increase since January - bringing the fund's assets to approximately 54 billion dollars. Jacobs has framed the rush into hard assets as part of a longer-term geopolitical realignment. "If you look at central banks around the world, a continuous move towards diversification beyond just holding dollars has been happening for decades... the shift from merely holding dollars to holding gold to consider other asset classes like Bitcoin is a trend that has been underway for many years." Central banks' gold buying activities illustrate this shift: net gold purchases peaked at 1,044 tons in 2024, marking the third consecutive year exceeding one thousand tons, double the average of the previous decade. He has linked those reserve moves to BlackRock's "superpower" framework for 2023, which identifies geopolitical fragmentation as a secular driver of profits. "That superpower is manifesting in policies such as bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and I think, directly related to that fragmentation is the increase of things like Bitcoin, as people see the geopolitical situation becoming more unstable, leading to a demand for more alternative assets." The influence of BlackRock is hard to overstate: the company ended the first quarter with a record $11.6 trillion in assets under management. By combining that scale with the public argument that the fair price of Bitcoin increases as instability rises, the asset management company is actually encoding a pricing model in which scarcity and the ability to withstand sanctions—not discounted cash flow—will set the marginal price. According to Jacobs, the market is "looking for alternatives — parts of the portfolio that will operate separately from stocks and bonds." With IBIT currently consuming more BTC per day than the number of miners that can mine after the halving, his comments could give the clearest blueprint yet for how the world's largest asset manager thinks about valuing the world's largest cryptocurrency.