BlackRock CEO Larry Fink used the World Economic Forum stage to argue that tokenization needs to move from pilot programs to market plumbing and suggested that a shared blockchain standard could cut costs and even “reduce corruption,” a framing that immediately reignited the “which chain?” debate across crypto and specifically inside the Ethereum community.
Fink didn’t name a network. But the combination of BlackRock’s onchain product footprint and its own research positioning makes Ethereum the most natural candidate for the “one common blockchain” he alluded to, even if he kept it implicit.
Fink’s remarks, delivered in the language of infrastructure rather than crypto evangelism, leaned heavily on the operational case for digitized assets and interoperable settlement rails.
“I think the movement towards tokenization, decimalization is necessary. It’s ironic that we see two emerging countries leading the world in the tokenization and digitization of their currency, that’s Brazil and India. I think we need to move very rapidly to doing that.”
He then pushed the argument beyond payments and into capital markets: “We would be reducing fees, we would do more democratization by reducing more fees if we had all investments on a tokenized platform that can move from a tokenized money market fund to equities and bonds and back and forth.”
The most provocative line was his call for standardization and the trade-off he implied comes with it. “[If] we have one common blockchain, we could reduce corruption. So I would argue that, yes, we have more dependencies on maybe one blockchain, which we could all talk about, but that being said, the activities are probably processed and more secure than ever before.”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told the World Economic Forum he thinks the movement toward tokenization and digitization is necessary. We need to move very rapidly to doing that. With one common blockchain, we can reduce corruption.
The “one common blockchain” Larry Fink referenced… https://t.co/sMMcg4oyN1 pic.twitter.com/VhRvuwCx00
— Ethereum Daily (@ETH_Daily) January 22, 2026
Why Ethereum Is Coming Up
In the abstract, “one common blockchain” could be read as a generic appeal for shared rails. In practice, BlackRock’s public-market crypto lineup and its tokenization work have concentrated around Bitcoin and Ethereum.
On the ETF side, BlackRock’s flagship US spot products track bitcoin and ether — iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) — with ETHA launching in 2024 and now sitting in the center of the firm’s public-facing Ethereum exposure.
On the tokenization side, BlackRock’s first tokenized fund, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), debuted on Ethereum via Securitize in March 2024, making Ethereum the original issuance network for what has become one of the market’s most closely watched institutional RWAs.
While BUIDL has expanded across multiple networks over time, the key point for Fink’s “common blockchain” framing is that Ethereum has been BlackRock’s default starting point for public-chain issuance, a meaningful signal in a market where “standards” tend to follow whoever already has the deepest liquidity, the broadest integration surface, and the most conservative counterparties.
The stronger tell came this week from BlackRock research rather than Davos soundbites. In its 2026 thematic outlook, BlackRock explicitly floats the idea of Ethereum as the infrastructure layer that collects the “toll” as tokenization scales. One slide asks: “Could Ethereum represent the ‘toll road’ to tokenization?” and adds that stablecoin adoption may be an early proxy for tokenization “in action,” with “blockchains like Ethereum” positioned to benefit.
In the same section, BlackRock cites RWA data “as of 1/5/2026” and notes that “of tokenized assets 65%+ are on Ethereum,” underscoring the network’s lead in today’s tokenized-asset stack.
At press time, ETH traded at $3,005.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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