Citi and BlackRock: How Financial Giants Are Building Digital Asset Infrastructure

The heads of digital initiatives at Citi and BlackRock appeared on Bloomberg Crypto to discuss how the world's largest financial institutions are changing their operating models under the influence of decentralized finance technology.

Who Was on the Show

Shahmir Khaliq runs Citi's services division, one of the largest settlement and custody businesses in the banking system. Under his leadership are transaction services, asset custody and the payments infrastructure used by corporations, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds around the world. Citi is one of the key links in Wall Street's settlement system.

Robert Mitchnick heads digital assets at BlackRock, which manages more than $10 trillion in assets. His team brought the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) to market. Within a few months of its launch in January 2024, the Bitcoin ETF attracted more than $20 billion and became one of the fastest-growing exchange-traded funds in the history of the US ETF market.

Having two senior executives of this caliber on the same stage sends an unambiguous signal: crypto is no longer a topic for startups and enthusiasts. It is an operational reality for the world's largest financial institutions.

Citi: Infrastructure Instead of Speculation

For several years, Citi has steadily been building infrastructure for institutional crypto. The bank launched Citi Token Services, a deposit tokenization platform that lets corporate clients make payments and settle transactions around the clock, bypassing the delays of the traditional correspondent banking system.

Citi's main focus areas in digital assets:

• Tokenization of trade finance and letters of credit
• Instant settlement between counterparties without a chain of intermediaries
• Integration of smart contracts with corporate treasuries
• Custody services for tokenized securities and real-world assets

For Citi, digital assets are not a speculative market but an infrastructure problem: ensuring reliability, regulatory compliance and operational speed where assets exist as tokens on a blockchain.

BlackRock: Tokenizing Traditional Markets

BlackRock is moving on a parallel track. After the Bitcoin ETF cemented the company's position in the public crypto market, Mitchnick and his team turned to tokenizing classic financial instruments: bonds, stocks and money market funds.

The flagship product is the BUIDL Fund (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund), a tokenized money market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. It offers institutional clients yields comparable to short-term US government bonds and allows tokens to be transferred instantly at any hour, without the settlement windows typical of traditional instruments.

"Tokenization is not a parallel financial system.

It is the next step in the evolution of markets that already exist," said Robert Mitchnick of BlackRock.

Mitchnick has repeatedly stressed that BlackRock's strategy does not involve creating new speculative asset classes. The goal is to make existing instruments more accessible, more liquid and easier to operate through blockchain infrastructure.

What This Means

The joint appearance of Citi and BlackRock executives on Bloomberg Crypto marks a systemic shift: institutional adoption of digital assets has moved from the pilot stage to scalable operational products. Two of the biggest players in traditional finance are building the infrastructure that will serve the next generation of capital markets.

The line between TradFi and DeFi continues to blur, and the driving force behind that process is increasingly not startups but banks with centuries of history.