BlackRock has now launched its tokenized money market fund on Solana, according to a report by Fortune. The fund, known as the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund or BUIDL, was launched in 2024 on Ethereum. The fund was also launched on five other blockchains. The company running the fund’s backend tech, Securitize, confirmed the expansion on Tuesday.
The fund currently holds $1.7 billion, mixing it between cash and US Treasury bills. According to a Securitize spokesperson, the total is expected to pass $2 billion in early April. The idea behind the product is to give crypto traders access to high-yield products that act like cash but are on the chain. The fund launched on Ethereum but has now made its way to a faster and cheaper Blockchain, with the network already becoming a favorite for developers and traders avoiding the gas fees on Ethereum.
BlackRock includes Solana as capital moves into on-chain
According to the COO at Securitize, Michael Sonenshein, the goal is to launch something that Wall Street has treated like a utility. “We’re making them unboring,” he said, referring to traditional money market funds. “We are advancing and leapfrogging some of the quote-unquote deficiencies that money markets may have in their traditional formats.”
According to the way the system works, investors are allowed to buy or sell these funds during banking hours, but crypto doesn’t work that way. In the crypto world, things moved fast, which means that traders need to be at alert 24/7, especially during crashes or pumps. That’s why there are Stablecoins, as they act as the price stabilizing tokens without the need to move money back to fiat. But they don’t pay interest or generate any yield.
That gap is what products like BUIDL are trying to use. This means that instead of holding a token at $1, investors get yield from real-world assets while staying in crypto. That makes what BlackRock is doing important because they allow traders to park capital without the need to exit the system.
BlackRock is not the only company offering these sorts of products, as Franklin Templeton has a similar market fund based on the blockchain. Solana Foundation executive Lily Liu explained why it is important. 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,” she said.
In January 2024, the company launched its spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States, with the product already pulling in $40 billion, making it the biggest ETF launch to date, according to SoSoValue. “ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told CNBC at the time.