BlackRock, a financial giant with over $7 trillion in assets under management, has posted a job offer for a position of VP Blockchain Lead, to drive demand for the firm’s cryptocurrency offerings.
The investment professional will, according to the job posting, create and implement BlackRock’s strategies to meet the growing demand for cryptoassets among investors. The candidate must have experience in valuation methodologies for cryptocurrencies and technical knowledge of cryptographic hash functions.
On top of that, BlackRock expects its Vice President Blockchain Lead to understand distributed network consensus mechanisms, public-private key cryptography, and have at least one year of experience with “evaluating game theory and decentralizing governance models associated with blockchain technology.”
The candidate must also have experience articulating with “key drivers of blockchain networks’ design and their impact on the four key dimensions of blockchain performance including speed, scalability, privacy, and security.” The Vice President of Blockchain Lead will be based in New York.
BlackRock’s CIO of Fixed Income, Rick Rieder, last month mentioned bitcoin replacing gold on CNBC. Notably, Rieder revealed he believes “bitcoin is here to stay.”
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has shown optimism regarding the flagship cryptocurrency in recent statements that bitcoin has “caught the attention and the imagination of many people.” Fink noted that it is “still untested” and has a “pretty small market relative to other markets.”
Nevertheless, the CEO noted that it’s a “think market” that moves every day and can “possibly” evolve into a global market. The comments stand in sharp contrast to what the BlackRock CEO was saying about Bitcoin three years ago. On 13 October 2017, at an Institute of International Finance (IIF) meeting, Fink called Bitcoin an “index of money laundering.”
He added it “shows you how much demand for money laundering there is in the world.” In February 2018, commenting on the “crypto craze,” BlackRock wrote that they see “potentially becoming more widely used in the future as the markets mature. Yet for now we believe they should only be considered by those who can stomach potentially complete losses.”
Featured image via Pixabay.
