Redditors Speculate on the Mysterious Connection Between BlackRock, Bitcoin’s Founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and Reddit’s WallStreetBets

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A Reddit post exploring a potentially interesting connection between the investment titan BlackRock, Bitcoin's founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and the WallStreetBets forum has gone viral over the past few hours. While the post is quite speculative in nature, it does leverage certain coincidences to raise a few pointed questions that merit a thorough inspection.

Reddit user Connect_Corner_5266, a self-professed finance professional, originally published his viral post on the WallStreetBets forum. However, as per his own admission, that post was summarily removed. Thereafter, he chose to reproduce his viral post (read here) on Reddit's DeepFuckingValue forum while embellishing it with some additional details.

In his original post on the WallStreetBets forum, Connect_Corner_5266 explored how certain key elements in BlackRock's and Bitcoin's history overlap. For instance, BlackRock began developing its own bespoke ledger system, dubbed Aladdin, around two decades before Satoshi Nakamoto published his famous Bitcoin whitepaper. Aladdin, as per BlackRock's own disclosure, is a cross-asset platform that unifies the entire investment management process via a common data language. In 2013, the platform handled assets worth over $13 trillion.

However, the smoking gun in this supposed interplay came in 2009 when BlackRock acquired Barclays' iShares business, which would propel the investment titan toward the apex of the ETF world in the years to come. Interestingly, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper emerged in the same year. And now, BlackRock stands to make billions of dollars in fees on its spot