BlackRock on the Blockchain

Summary

Asset managers (e.g. BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity) help people grow their wealth. But traditional asset managers suffer from structural problems that cause underperformance.

Why: The Case for a New Kind of Asset Manager

The $120T+ asset management industry is broken. Most actively managed funds underperform their benchmarks, especially after fees.

Fee Misalignment

BlackRock earns ~73% of its revenue from management fees. These fees are collected regardless of fund performance. Performance fees account for just ~5% of revenue. This incentivizes asset accumulation over performance, consensus-driven investing, and narrative capture (e.g. BlackRock's shifting ESG stance chasing institutional clout).

Regulatory Restrictions

Dense regulation hinders performance. Compliance delays action, fiduciary standards prefer conservative allocations, and cross-border restrictions fragment strategy. The gap between how capital should move and how it can move drags down returns.

Organizational Complexity

Sprawling hierarchies create bloat. Decisions pass through committees, internal politics shape strategy, and huge operational costs reinforce the pressure to prioritize asset gathering. BlackRock has 20,000+ employees, 70+ global offices, and 1,700+ ETFs.

The Death Spiral

These problems reinforce each other in a negative cycle:

Why Now

A window of opportunity is opening for a new kind of asset manager.

Peak Uncertainty

Investment conviction is at an all-time low. Growing (let alone preserving) wealth is more difficult, time-consuming, and anxiety-inducing than ever.

• Stocks ranging at all-time highs
• Precious metals swinging violently
• USD reserve status being questioned
• AI threatening to displace white-collar work
• Crypto underperforming expectations

Ownership Infrastructure

MetaDAO's permissionless launchpad lets anyone launch an "ownership coin" whose value is tied to a futarchy-governed treasury. This infrastructure is battle-tested and now publicly available.

In 2025, MtnCapital launched an ownership fund on MetaDAO, positioned as an early-stage VC fund. But it struggled to pass proposals and eventually wound down.

Futarchy governance works by letting markets price competing outcomes, but private VC deals are difficult to price with asymmetric information, long timelines, and binary outcomes.

Liquid asset allocation for risk-adjusted returns gives futarchy the pricing efficiency it requires. Decision markets can evaluate portfolio construction, yield strategies, and value accrual better than illiquid VC bets.

Proof of safety: When MtnCapital wound down, holders received their proportional share of the treasury through the protocol's built-in liquidation mechanism. The system's guarantees worked as intended. Even in failure, no value is lost to extraction or mismanagement.

Onchain Assets

The universe of investable assets on Solana is expanding rapidly. Spot markets, perpetual futures, lending markets, structured yield products, and RWAs (tokenized stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.) are accessible onchain with deep liquidity and composable infrastructure.

The breadth of onchain assets available now rivals what traditional asset managers can access, without the friction.

How: BlockRock's Principles

BlockRock manages assets with a new system where incentives, governance, and execution are rebuilt from first principles.

Ownership

Tokenholders are the primary beneficiaries of fund performance via treasury backing. Minimal management fees are funded transparently from the treasury and adjustable via governance. No percentage-based skimming.

Tokens also enable borderless access. Anyone with a wallet can hold the token, bypassing the geographic and accreditation barriers of traditional funds.

Futarchy

Governance uses conditional decision markets. When a proposal enters, two markets open: one pricing the token if the proposal is adopted, another if rejected. At the end of the period, the condition with the highest time-weighted average price wins.

• Replaces committees with markets. No boardroom politics, no career risk aversion, no consensus-seeking. Decisions are priced by participants with capital at stake to maximize risk-adjusted returns.
• Operates continuously. Speed of capital movement matches speed of opportunity.
• Reinforces incentive alignment. Because participants are token-holders pricing outcomes, the governance layer inherits the ownership layer's alignment. Self-interested pricing incentivizes better decision-making.

AI

AI agents act as always-on analysts, ingesting live data, market signals, and macro context to generate a continuous stream of proposals. Critically:

• They propose, never execute. AI agents have no authority to force decisions — only to submit ideas to the governance layer. Their proposals compete with human submissions on equal footing.
• They are judged by decision markets. Good proposals win regardless of source.
• They scale with compute, not headcount. As AI capabilities grow, the fund's capability grows too. With minimal overhead.

The Positive Flywheel

BlockRock inverts the traditional cycle of bloat and extraction:

The Resulting User Experience

What: BlockRock in Practice

The playbook for launching, operating, and scaling BlockRock.

Launch

BlockRock funds launch via ICO on MetaDAO's permissionless launchpad, which provides full-stack futarchy governance with legal enforcement, so that token value is tied to treasury value.

BlockRock's flagship fund launches first with a mandate for a moderate risk strategy to maximize Sortino ratio (penalizing downside volatility) by allocating the treasury into a portfolio of onchain positions.

95% of tokens are distributed to ICO participants at the same price. The remaining 5% is allocated to the founding team, which unlocks at 3-month TWAPs of 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X, and 32X the ICO price. A $5K allowance per month is allocated to the team for infrastructure.

BlockRock may launch additional funds in the future with unique mandates and risk profiles.

Operations

Every fund operation follows the same decision cycle:

Distributions

Any token holder can submit a proposal to distribute value to holders via buybacks, dividends, or liquidation. If a decision market resolves in favor of a distribution, the treasury is automatically distributed according to the proposal.

Communications

BlockRock is a spectator sport. Everyday, anyone interested in financial markets can check BlockRock to see strategists proposing investment theses, traders battling to approve or reject proposals, and the fund's portfolio growing in lockstep with the token. Every decision market resolution is an official verdict, automatically executed by smart contracts. Updates are shared on X (Twitter) via @blockrockfund.

Scaling

BlockRock is designed to scale to trillions in assets under management. The token's mint authority is governed by futarchy. So decision markets can approve additional fundraises with new token mints, while avoiding unfair dilution. BlockRock funds expand when governance deems it bullish.