Jamie Dimon says he doesn’t care about Larry Fink changing his view on bitcoin

There’s at least one Wall Street heavyweight from Larry Fink’s peer group that could care less about the BlackRock CEO’s evolving views on bitcoin and surprise, surprise it’s the reliably blunt Jamie Dimon.

Dimon, who serves as CEO of the financial juggernaut JP Morgan Chase, has consistently derided the world’s most popular cryptocurrency by market cap, and once again expressed his dislike for the digital asset when speaking to CNBC on Wednesday from Davos, Switzerland, site of the World Economic Forum.

“This is the last time I’m talking about this with CNBC, so help me god,” Dimon told CNBC before offering a curt answer when asked about Fink’s views of bitcoin — given BlackRock launched a spot bitcoin ETF last week. “I don’t care. So just please stop talking about this shit,” he said.

He went on to say “I don’t know what [Fink] would say about blockchain versus currencies that do something versus bitcoin that does nothing,” Dimon added.

Finding common ground

While Dimon decried bitcoin, he expressed more support for smart contract-enabled blockchains. He gave the example of tokenization — a potential area of agreement relating to the wider crypto space with Fink.

Last week, Fink said bitcoin ETFs “are just stepping stones towards tokenization and I really do believe this is where we’re going to be going.”

But, unlike Dimon, Fink was positive on both crypto and bitcoin. He compared bitcoin’s trajectory to gold’s history. “It’s no different than what gold represented over thousands of years,” he said.

In 2022, Fink also called cryptocurrency potentially transcendent. “It’s an international asset,” he said in a July interview with CNBC, referring to crypto broadly. “It has a differentiating value versus other asset classes, but more importantly, because it’s so international, it’s going to transcend any one currency.”

So far, BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF is one of the most popular in terms of trading activity and has generated nearly $2 billion worth of volume through three days of trading, according to data from Yahoo Finance compiled by The Block.

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