Today Securitize, BlackRock’s tokenization partner, announced that BlackRock’s money market fund, BUIDL, is now available on five additional blockchains. It launched in March on Ethereum and has now expanded to Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon.
BUIDL is the largest tokenized money market fund on a public blockchain with a market capitalization of $517 million. Ondo Finance has issued its own money market fund backed by BUIDL, so it accounts for $192 million of BUIDL’s balance. While BlackRock has a minimum investment of $5 million, Ondo’s OUSG has a $5,000 minimum and also temporarily waves fees.
Notably, BUIDL has management fees of 50 basis points on most blockchains but it’s only 20 bps on Aptos, Avalanche, and Polygon, with the lower costs subsidized by foundations associated with the blockchains.
“We wanted to develop an ecosystem that was thoughtfully designed to be digital and take advantage of the advantages of tokenization,” said Securitize CEO and co-founder Carlos Domingo. “Real-world asset tokenization is scaling, and we’re excited to have these blockchains added to increase the potential of the BUIDL ecosystem. 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.”
In October Securitize integrated with Zero Hash to allow digital asset firms to use USDC to buy BUIDL and keep their funds on-chain. For some time the USDC stablecoin issuer Circle has said it stands ready to buy BUIDL funds for USDC, allowing investors to exit their investment whenever they like. On a related point, we previously explored why asset managers might want a shared stablecoin.
