BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, signaled a clear shift in how large investors view the crypto market, pointing to artificial intelligence as a more meaningful driver than the expansion of new tokens.
Altcoin interest fading fast
Speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in New York on March 24, Mitchnick described a market that has moved sharply away from broad exposure to smaller assets.
Token turnover among the top names has been “pretty ferocious,” he said, with only bitcoin and ether maintaining consistent positions over time.
He was blunt about the rest of the market:
“The majority of that is nonsense.”
As a result, institutional clients now concentrate on a narrow set of assets rather than building wide portfolios, with BlackRock’s own bitcoin holdings reflecting that demand.
Interest beyond bitcoin and ether remains limited.
AI as crypto’s natural partner
Against that backdrop, Mitchnick framed AI as the bigger theme shaping crypto’s future role, arguing the two technologies are naturally complementary:
“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.”
That framing casts crypto less as a speculative asset class and more as infrastructure for an AI-driven economy.
Miners pivoting toward AI workloads
A growing number of bitcoin miners have already begun shifting resources toward AI computing, drawn by steadier revenue and rising demand for processing power.
Several publicly listed miners, including Hut 8, Core Scientific, and Iren, are either repurposing data centers or signing hosting deals tied to AI and high-performance computing.
Mitchnick also linked AI-driven disruption directly to bitcoin’s appeal as a portfolio allocation, suggesting it may act as a stabilizing diversifier during periods of rapid technological change:
“There are intersection points that are relevant… there’s clearly an advantage and an opportunity to play a role in the AI economy.”
