BlackRock expands $1.7B tokenized treasury fund to Solana

Key Takeaways

• BlackRock has expanded its tokenized treasury fund to Solana, making it the seventh blockchain platform for BUIDL.
• The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Fund has amassed $1.7 billion and expects to exceed $2 billion soon.

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BlackRock, overseeing $11.6 trillion in client assets, is bringing its tokenized treasury fund, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Fund, also known as BUIDL, to Solana, Fortune reported on March 25. The fund has attracted around $1.7 billion in assets under management since its launch, according to data from RWA.xyz.

With this integration, Solana becomes the seventh supported chain for the BUIDL fund, which currently operates on Ethereum, Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon.

The move comes after Franklin Templeton announced the launch of its money market fund, the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, or FOBXX on Solana. Franklin’s tokenized treasury fund currently ranks as the third-largest tokenized money market fund, only after BlackRock’s BUIDL and Hashnote’s USYC fund.

The BUIDL fund operates 24/7, unlike traditional money market funds limited to business hours, providing crypto traders with a yield-generating alternative to non-interest-bearing stablecoins like USDT and USDC.

Earlier this month, BUIDL became the first tokenized fund from a Wall Street institution to achieve the $1 billion milestone. A spokesperson for Securitize, which serves as the tokenization provider for BUIDL, expects the fund to exceed $2 billion in early April.

“We’re making them unboring,” Michael Sonnenshein, COO at Securitize, told Fortune. “We are advancing and leapfrogging some of the quote-unquote deficiencies that money markets may have in their traditional formats.”

Securitize announced January its integration with the Solana blockchain in January. The firm aims to expand the accessibility and adoption of tokenized real-world assets, and Solana’s technology provides the necessary infrastructure to support this goal.

The expansion follows BlackRock’s growing presence in crypto markets, including its spot-Bitcoin ETF launch in January 2024, which has attracted nearly $40 billion according to crypto analytics firm SoSoValue.

“ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told CNBC in January. “Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset.”

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