If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Here are five crypto skeptics who have reluctantly embraced the opportunity of making loads of money with blockchain.
The road from believing “crypto is a scam” to “Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class” is a long way to travel, fraught with many a twist and turn.
Yet against all the odds, a surprising number of high-profile skeptics have undertaken the journey unscathed and, perhaps more remarkably, without ever admitting they were wrong.
The very naysayers who once warned of a “crypto apocalypse” have begun preaching the virtues of blockchain rails and launching tokenized products of their own.
From Bitcoin exchange-traded funds to tokenized gold, here are five of the biggest crypto backflips.
Larry Fink may be the archetypal born-again crypto convert. In 2017, the BlackRock chief executive cast Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering,” nicely capturing mainstream finance’s view at the time of a market they believed was dominated by wild speculation and dubious flows.
As a side note: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. While money laundering in crypto was estimated at $82 billion in 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $800 billion to $2 trillion is laundered the old fashioned way each year.
Related: BlackRock Bitcoin ETF sees near-record outflows as BTC dips below $75K
It's not entirely clear why Fink decided to recalibrate but by 2020 he started acknowledging its potential, in 2023 he was actively defending BlackRock's crypto push, and today BlackRock has become one of the most important institutional access points to Bitcoin via spot ETFs, helping pull the asset into the heart of the regulated investment universe.
In his annual shareholder letters, Fink now waxes lyrical about tokenization and writes impassioned OpEds about how it is set to transform the financial system.
If Fink is a born-again believer, Jamie Dimon sits squarely in the reluctant and still skeptical camp.
The JPMorgan chief has called Bitcoin a “fraud,” crypto investors “stupid,” and warned that BTC will blow up on more than one occasion, not to mention using Congressional hearings as a platform to reiterate his distaste for the asset.
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