BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund lands on Solana

BlackRock is now running its tokenized money market fund on Solana, according to Fortune. The fund—officially called the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, or just BUIDL—was launched a year ago and already sits on Ethereum and five other blockchains. Solana is the seventh. On Tuesday, Securitize, the company running the fund’s backend tech, confirmed the expansion.

The fund currently holds $1.7 billion in a mix of cash and U.S. Treasury bills. A spokesperson for Securitize reportedly said the total will pass $2 billion in early April. The whole idea behind BUIDL is to give crypto-native traders access to a yield-bearing product that behaves like cash but lives fully on-chain.

The fund started on Ethereum but has now moved to a faster and cheaper blockchain—Solana—that’s already become a favorite for developers and traders avoiding Ethereum gas fees.

BlackRock adds Solana as capital flows into on-chain funds

Michael Sonnenshein, who serves as COO at Securitize, told Fortune the goal is to bring life to something 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.”

In the usual system, investors can only buy or sell these funds during banking hours. But crypto doesn’t work like that. Crypto markets run 24/7, and money moves fast. Traders need something that works at all times, especially during sudden crashes or pumps. That’s where stablecoins like USDT and USDC have come in, offering price stability without having to convert back into fiat. But those coins don’t pay interest, and they don’t generate any yield.

This gap gave rise to products like BUIDL. Instead of just holding tokens that stay at $1, investors get yield from real-world assets while staying entirely in crypto. That makes BlackRock’s entrance important—not because they’re big, but because they’re giving crypto traders another way to park capital without exiting the system.

And BlackRock’s not the only one doing this. Franklin Templeton has a similar blockchain-based money market fund. Figure Markets, a firm launched by Mike Cagney, the same guy who founded SoFi, recently got a green light from the SEC to launch an interest-bearing stablecoin.

Lily Liu, who runs the Solana Foundation, explained why this trend is growing. “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.

Back in January 2024, the firm launched a spot Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. That product, according to SoSoValue, has already pulled in $40 billion—making it the biggest ETF launch ever.

Larry Fink, who’s CEO of BlackRock, told CNBC at the time, “ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset.”

And now, BlackRock is expanding into Europe too. The company will begin trading its new Bitcoin exchange-traded product, the iShares Bitcoin ETP, on Xetra and Euronext Paris under the ticker IB1T, and on Euronext Amsterdam under BTCN.

This of course comes after the Wall Street giant’s U.S. Bitcoin ETF hit $48 billion. That debut broke records and became the largest ETF launch in U.S. history. The new European ETP will come with a temporary fee waiver of 10 basis points, lowering the cost to 0.15% until the end of 2025. After that, it will jump back to 0.25%, which matches the fee charged by CoinShares’ physical Bitcoin product. CoinShares currently leads the European market with $1.3 billion in assets.

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