Blackrock’s BUIDL goes multichain

Asset manager Blackrock will be launching its tokenized money fund on nearly half a dozen additional blockchain networks, according to a Nov. 13 announcement.

The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) will expand to Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche (AVAX), Optimism, and Polygon, Blackrock said. It was initially launched on the Ethereum (ETH) network.

Tokenized by Securitize, BUIDL is a money market fund and invests primarily in short-dated United States Treasury bills (T-Bills) and similar low-risk, interest-bearing securities.

“With these new chains we’ll start to see more investors looking to leverage the underlying technology to increase efficiencies on all the things that until now have been hard to do,” Carlos Domingo, Securitize’s CEO, in a statement.

Demand is surging for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) offering low-risk yield from T-Bills and other money market instruments.

Tokenized US treasury debt commands approximately $2.3 billion in total value locked as of Nov. 13, according to RWA.xyz.

BUIDL is the largest tokenized treasury fund in terms of assets under management (AUM), followed by Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX), with AUM of approximately $510 million and $450 million, respectively.

“Each new blockchain enables the ecosystem of applications and users to natively interact with BUIDL, which can achieve on-chain yield with flexible custody, near real-time 24/7/365 peer-to-peer transfers, and on-chain dividend accrual and distribution.”

Tokenized RWAs — from T-Bills to artworks — represent a $30-trillion market opportunity globally, Colin Butler, Polygon’s global head of institutional capital, told Cointelegraph in August.

“Tokenization can potentially improve liquidity in the trading of Treasuries by reducing operational and settlement frictions,” according to the United States Department of the Treasury’s Q4 2024 report.

The committee said distributed ledger technology (DLT) and smart contracts can be particularly beneficial.

“Immutable ledgers could allow for greater transparency in Treasury market operations, reducing opacity, and providing regulators, issuers, and investors with more real-time insight into trading activities,” according to the report.

Franklin Templeton is launching its tokenized money fund on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 network, the asset manager said on Oct. 31.

Libeara and FundBridge Capital are launching a tokenized United States Treasury bill (T-Bill) fund on Avalanche network.

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