BlackRock brings $1.7B tokenized treasury fund to Solana

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Key Takeaways

BlackRock is expanding its digital asset offerings by launching a tokenized treasury fund on Solana.
The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Fund has amassed $1.7 billion and expects to exceed $2 billion soon.

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 tokenized money market fund, which combines traditional money market instruments with blockchain technology, has accumulated $1.7 billion in cash and Treasury bills, with expectations to exceed $2 billion in early April, according to Securitize.

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

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.”

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.

“Our vision for why on-chain finance adds more value is because you can do more things with those assets on chain than you could if [they’re] sitting in your brokerage account,” said Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation.

Earlier this month, BlackRock’s BUIDL surpassed $1 billion in assets under management, becoming the first tokenized fund from a Wall Street institution to achieve this milestone.