BlackRock’s tokenized money fund holders can now explore DeFi opportunities while also earning interest from U.S. Treasury bills, according to Securitize.
Securitize and Elixir announced on Nov. 19 that they are rolling out a liquid staking token (LST) for tokenized securities, incorporating BlackRock’s BUIDL on-chain money fund.
The deUSD RWA Institutional Program, designed by Elixir, “unlocks enhanced yield-opportunities and composability for more than $1B Real World Assets (RWAs) issued by Securitize across decentralized finance (DeFi),” according to Securitize’s press release.
The DeFi vaults, based on the Ethereum network’s ERC-4626 standard, “allows Blackrock BUIDL and other RWA holders to seamlessly access DeFi using deUSD as the primary currency,” Elixir said in a Nov. 19 post on the X platform.
The USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), created by BlackRock and tokenized by Securitize, invests primarily in short-term U.S. Treasury bills (T-Bills) and other comparable low-risk, interest-accruing securities.
BUIDL depositors are issued sBUIDL LSTs by the DeFi vaults, according to Elixir.
“BUIDL holders can now mint sBUIDL and use it to access DeFi via deUSD, all while continuing to earn the underlying yield. $1B in RWA liquidity just became unlocked,” RWA.xyz, an RWA database, said in an X post.
On November 13, BlackRock launched BUIDL on multiple blockchain networks, including Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, and Polygon.
“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,” Carlos Domingo, Securitize’s CEO, said in a statement.
Tokenized RWAs, which yield low-risk returns from T-bills and other money market instruments, are seeing a surge in demand.
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RWA.xyz reports that as of November 19, tokenized U.S. Treasury debt has reached a total value locked of about $2.4 billion.
The Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX), with assets under management (AUM) of about $540 million and $450 million, ranks second to BUIDL, the largest tokenized treasury fund by AUM.
Launching across multiple chains enables “BUIDL to be used within leading blockchain-based financial products and infrastructure across ecosystems,” BlackRock said.
In an interview in August, Colin Butler, Polygon’s global head of institutional capital, explained that tokenized RWAs — including T-bills and artworks — represent a $30 trillion global market opportunity.
“Tokenization can potentially improve liquidity in the trading of Treasuries by reducing operational and settlement frictions,” according to the United States Department of the Treasury’s Q4 2024 report.
