Larry Fink, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of $10 trillion asset manager BlackRock, said he was "pleasantly surprised" at the retail response for his firm's spot bitcoin ETF and declared that he was "very bullish on the long-term viability of bitcoin."
Speaking to Fox Business' Charlie Gasparino and Liz Claman on Wednesday, Fink commented briefly on BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin 
BTC -0.69% Trust (IBIT), saying, "We would never have predicted it before we filed it that we were going to see this type of retail demand."
"That surprised me how much [bitcoin has] gone up... We're creating now a market that has more liquidity, more transparency," said of being involved in bitcoin.
According to The Block's bitcoin ETF data page, IBIT has accumulated $16 billion in assets under management and north of 40% of all bitcoin ETFs' daily trading volumes.
When Gasparino asked, "You thought you'd do good but not this good?" Fink laughed and said, "Yes."
Claman noted that IBIT, which went to market in January, looks like it is about to overtake Grayscale's spot bitcoin ETF (GBTC), the latter having first existed in a previous form for over a decade. Fink proclaimed, "IBIT is the fastest-growing ETF in the history of ETFs."
