BlackRock Expands Tokenized Fund BUIDL Beyond Ethereum to 5 New Blockchains

BlackRock, the world's largest asset-management company, said it is bringing its tokenized real-world asset fund to five more blockchains, taking it beyond Ethereum and expanding access to the largest money-market fund token.

The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), issued in partnership with tokenization platform Securitize, is now accessible on the Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism's OP Mainnet and Polygon networks, the company said on Wednesday.

Tokenization of real-world assets is one of the hottest trends at the intersection of crypto and traditional finance. Digital asset firms and global financial heavyweights are racing to put instruments such as government bonds, private credit and funds on blockchain rails, aiming to achieve faster settlements and operational efficiencies.

"We wanted to develop an ecosystem that was thoughtfully designed to be digital and take advantage of the advantages of tokenization," Securitize CEO and co-founder Carlos Domingo said in a statement. "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."

BlackRock introduced its first tokenized product in March. The BUIDL token is backed by short-term U.S. government bonds and its price is anchored to $1. Institutions and protocol treasuries use the product to park their on-chain cash to earn a yield or as collateral for trading, while other decentralized finance protocols such as Ondo Finance build their products on top of it. BUIDL has raked in over $520 million of deposits, becoming the largest product in the $2.3 billion tokenized U.S. Treasury market, rwa.xyz data shows.

BUIDL's management fee on Ethereum, Arbitrum and Optimism is 50 basis points. It is cheaper — only 20 basis points — on Aptos, Avalanche and Polygon. Ecosystem development organizations Aptos Foundation, Avalanche (BVI), Inc. and Polygon Labs BD Investments (Cayman) Ltd. each agreed to pay BlackRock a quarterly fee.