Fink, Armstrong, and the DealBook Turning Point

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, December 4. And today, we are talking Larry Fink and Brian Armstrong at the DealBook Summit. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying a breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna dive deeper into the conversation. Come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly/breakdownpod. Alright, friends. On Wednesday, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sat down for a joint interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit. Now if you are not familiar with DealBook, it is a major event from the New York Times and serves as a platform for the biggest conversations in finance, politics, and society as a whole. This year's summit, for example, featured Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadeh, Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, and Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, just to give you a sense of the cross section of guests. Now crypto hasn't been featured at DealBook since 2022, when Sam Bagman Fried gave his last interview as a free man via telelink from The Bahamas a few weeks after the FTX collapse. Thankfully, this time, crypto's appearance at the summit is under much better circumstances. As we covered on yesterday's show, Larry Fink is firing up a new press tour to push tokenization as the biggest story in finance for the coming year. Earlier in the week, he published a primer on tokenization in The Economist intended to reach a mainstream audience, and this interview was definitely a continuation of that goal. Meanwhile, Brian Armstrong has been quietly building out Coinbase's strategy as the everything exchange and is poised to cement Coinbase as a major US financial institution. Both CEOs are looking to take crypto mainstream, and DealBook was the perfect stage to do so. Still, it was an Andrew Ross Sorkin interview, so we had to begin with a heavy dose of crypto skepticism. He began by referring to Larry Fink's previously held belief that Bitcoin is a, quote, index of money laundering. Fink responded, you've got to evolve and change. During COVID, we had a little more time, and I actually took it upon myself to understand what I was missing. After speaking with people in the industry, Fink said that he has come to a new understanding. I think there is a large use case for Bitcoin and I still do today. This is one thing I get excited about. I had very strong views, but that doesn't mean I'm not wrong. This is a very glaring public example of a big shift in my opinion. Armstrong discussed his recent experience working with banks and other financial institutions. He said he's now frequently running into situations where the innovation arm of …