BlackRock expands tokenized money market fund to Polygon, other blockchains

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BlackRock expands tokenized money market fund to Polygon, other blockchains

The BlackRock logo is pictured outside the company’s headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York City on May 25, 2021.

Carlo Allegri | Reuters

BlackRock has expanded its tokenized money market fund to include several more blockchains.

The investment manager said Wednesday that its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is now available to investors on the Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, OP Mainnet (formerly known as Optimism) and Polygon blockchains. It initially launched the fund on Ethereum in March.

The BUIDL fund, which BlackRock debuted two months after iShares Bitcoin Trust, its popular bitcoin ETF, gives investors an opportunity to earn U.S. dollar yields through a blockchain-based vehicle. The idea of tokenizing “real world assets” like gold – a key aspect of decentralized finance, or DeFi – has gained popularity among financial institutions that are cautious on crypto assets but keen on the underlying blockchain technology.

“There’s some irony in the fact that with … [iShares Bitcoin Trust], we took a crypto native investment exposure and we put it in a traditional finance wrapper … and with tokenization, we’re taking traditional finance investment exposure, and we’re putting it in a crypto native wrapper,” Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said in March.

“That dichotomy will persist for a while,” he added at the time. “But eventually, we expect there will be some convergence that looks like the best of the old system and the best of this new technology fused into a next generation infrastructure set in finance.”

The announcement follows a week-long rally in cryptocurrencies – Polygon’s token climbed 28%, according to Coin Metrics – after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. On the campaign trail, Trump promised more supportive regulations for crypto projects and businesses – a reversal from Biden administration policy, in which the Securities and Exchange Commission has largely regulated the industry through enforcement actions, hampering growth.

DeFi is one of the most popular sectors among crypto market participants but has suffered from the lack of regulatory clarity – with tokens of some DeFi projects being classified as securities in SEC lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase last year.

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