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BlackRock’s Robbie Mitchnick believes AI to be a bigger long-term force for crypto than the launching of new tokens.
The Future Of Crypto Is Not In Tokens But In AI
Robbie Mitchnick, the head of the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, said at the Digital Asset Summit in New York this Tuesday that big investors are rethinking their approach to crypto, signaling artificial intelligence (AI) as a more significant long‑term engine than simply launching more tokens, CoinDesk reports.
According to Mitchnick, since most tokens have short life cycles and limited long‑term value, client allocations are narrowing into a few core assets rather than broad altcoin baskets. As a result of this, institutional players are tightening their focus on bitcoin and ether, treating the bulk of remaining tokens as fleeting and mostly “nonsense”. “The majority of that is nonesense”, said Mitchnick himself.
Token turnover in the top ranks has been “pretty ferocious”, with only Bitcoin and Ethereum sustaining long‑term relevance, while the majority of circulating tokens lack staying power. Right now, BTC and ETH sit in different but complementary “monetary universes”: Bitcoin as a savings‑style hedge and Ethereum as productive infrastructure for on‑chain activity and tokenization.
What This Means For The IndustryFurthermore, Mitchnick sees this consolidation as a natural evolution and not a failure, with AI acting as the structural catalyst that will actually need crypto rails in the real economy. He believes there is an organic alignment between what he calls “computer-native money” and “computer-native data and intelligence”:
“AI agents are very unlikely to use, you know, Fedwire and SWIFT (…) What is crypto? Crypto is computer-native money… AI is computer-native data and intelligence. And so there’s a natural symbiosis there”
Under Mitchnick’s perspective, crypto is seen less as a speculative trade and more as core infrastructure. A growing cohort of Bitcoin miners is already reallocating capacity to AI workloads, attracted by more predictable income streams and surging demand for compute. Publicly listed firms like Hut 8 (HUT), Core Scientific (CORZ) and Iren (IREN) are converting data centers or signing hosting agreements focused on AI and high‑performance computing. Other miners are floating comparable strategies, even as traditional mining remains at the heart of their operations.
If BlackRock’s thesis holds, the real long‑term bet is on AI plus the core crypto stack (Bitcoin, Ethereum and tokenization rails), while long‑tail token churn turns even more fleeting and purely speculative. In an AI‑led market, the lasting upside is likely to accrue to the assets that autonomous agents and institutional plumbing actually rely on, not to whatever “AI coin” narrative happens to be trending next.
Cover image from Perplexity, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
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