The financial titan is expanding the world’s largest tokenized fund to Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon.
BlackRock also runs the largest spot bitcoin and ether ETFs in the US.
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Posted November 13, 2024 at 10:48 am EST.
BlackRock announced on Wednesday that its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), the world’s largest tokenized fund with a current market cap of $522 million, has expanded beyond Ethereum and gone multi-chain.
In partnership with tokenization firm Securitize Markets, BlackRock rolled out BUIDL on Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon PoS, nearly eight months after its inception on Ethereum, according to a Securitize press release. BUIDL allows institutional investors to earn yields on tokenized U.S. Treasuries,
BlackRock’s management fee on Aptos, Avalanche, and Polygon is 20 basis points, while Optimism’s OP Mainnet, Ethereum base layer, and Arbitrum have a 50 basis points fee.
“Real-world asset tokenization is scaling, and we’re excited to have these blockchains added to increase the potential of the BUIDL ecosystem,” said Securitize CEO and co-founder Carlos Domingo in the press release. “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.”
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Neil Harounian, head of ecosystem at Aptos Labs, wrote Wednesday on X that “This is step 0 in the real convergence between TradFi and DeFi.” Of the new blockchains BUIDL has expanded to, Aptos is the only chain that is non-EVM, short for “Ethereum Virtual Machine.” EVM chains refer to blockchains that are compatible with Ethereum, enabling Ethereum-native smart contracts to be deployed and executed on networks outside of the L1.
The total value of all tokenized treasuries in circulation currently stands at nearly $2.4 billion, having grown more than 200% year-to-date, data from real-world assets platform RWA.XYZ shows.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a titan in traditional finance, has also become a giant in the crypto world through its category-leading spot ether and bitcoin ETFs in the US, with a combined $30.6 billion in net assets, per SoSoValue.
The native tokens of the new blockchains BlackRock launched BUIDL on—ARB, OP, APT, AVAX, and POL—have all increased at least 1% in the last hour, led by OP jumping 3.3%, according to CoinGecko.
