The BlackRock logo is photographed outside the company’s headquarters in Manhattan, New York City, on May 25, 2021.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
BlackRock expands its tokenized money market fund to include more blockchains.
The investment manager said on Wednesday that its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is now open to investors in Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, OP Mainnet (formerly Optimism) and Polygon Blockchain. The fund originally launched on Ethereum in March.
The BUIDL fund, which BlackRock launched two months after its popular Bitcoin ETF iShares Bitcoin Trust, offers investors the opportunity to earn U.S. dollar returns through blockchain-based instruments. The idea of tokenizing “real-world assets” such as gold – a key aspect of decentralized finance (or DeFi) – is gaining traction among financial institutions wary of cryptoassets but keen on the underlying blockchain technology welcome.
“The irony is that through…(iShares Bitcoin Trust), we are taking crypto-native investment exposure and putting it into a traditional financial wrapper…Through tokenization, we are taking traditional financial investment exposure , and we’re putting it into a crypto-native wrapper,” Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, said in March.
“This dichotomy will continue for some time,” he added at the time. “But ultimately, we expect there will be some convergence, where it looks like the best of the old systems and the best of the new technology are fused into the next generation of financial infrastructure.”
The announcement comes after a week of gains for the cryptocurrency – Polygon’s token According to data from Coin Metrics, the stock price rose by 28% after Donald Trump won the US presidential election. On the campaign trail, Trump promised more supportive regulations for crypto projects and businesses, contrary to the Biden administration’s policy in which the Securities and Exchange Commission has largely relied on enforcement actions to Regulate the industry, thus stunting growth.
DeFi is one of the most popular areas among cryptocurrency market participants, but it suffers from a lack of clear regulation – last year’s SEC lawsuit against Binance and Coinbase saw some DeFi projects’ tokens classified as securities .
About The Author
