BlackRock Expands BUIDL Fund Across Multiple Blockchains, Enhancing Access to Tokenized Treasury Market
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced Wednesday a significant expansion of its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, to five additional blockchain networks: Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon. The move comes eight months after the fund’s initial launch on Ethereum, marking a substantial step forward in the institutional adoption of blockchain technology for traditional financial instruments.
The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), which has rapidly grown to become the largest tokenized fund globally with $517 million in assets under management, offers investors exposure to short-dated U.S. Treasury bills and similar low-risk, interest-bearing securities through blockchain technology. The expansion enables native integration with blockchain-based financial products and infrastructure across multiple ecosystems, facilitating on-chain yield generation, near real-time peer-to-peer transfers, and automated dividend distribution.
“We wanted to develop an ecosystem that was thoughtfully designed to be digital and take advantage of the advantages of tokenization,” said Carlos Domingo, CEO and co-founder of Securitize, BlackRock’s tokenization partner. “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 a notable development for the tokenized asset landscape, BlackRock has implemented varying fee structures across the networks. While maintaining a 50 basis point management fee on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism, the fund offers reduced fees of 20 basis points on Aptos, Avalanche, and Polygon, with the difference subsidized by foundations associated with these blockchains.
The expansion comes at a time of growing institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). BUIDL currently commands approximately 22% market share in the $2.3 billion tokenized government securities market, leading competitors such as Franklin Templeton’s OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX).
BNY Mellon continues to serve as the fund administrator and custodian for BUIDL across all blockchain networks, bridging traditional and digital financial ecosystems. The expansion provides increased optionality for investors, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and digital asset-native firms, allowing developers to build on the BlackRock fund within their preferred ecosystem.
The minimum investment requirement for BUIDL remains at $5 million, though alternative access routes exist through platforms like Ondo Finance, which offers exposure to the fund with a lower $5,000 minimum investment threshold.
This multi-chain expansion represents another significant step in BlackRock’s digital asset strategy, following the successful launch of its iShares Bitcoin Trust earlier this year. The development underscores the growing convergence of traditional finance with blockchain technology, as major financial institutions continue to explore the benefits of asset tokenization for improving market efficiency and accessibility.
