The world’s largest asset manager will offer tokenised versions of select existing BlackRock Institutional Cash Series money market funds, which manage a combined US$311 billion in assets, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The offering will include sterling, euro and US-dollar-denominated share classes.
Each digital token is equivalent to a share in the underlying money market fund, which investors will be able to transfer around-the-clock, directly between approved digital wallets, the company said.
Tokenization is the use of crypto’s underlying technology to issue traditional financial assets digitally, with the aim of making them easier and faster to transfer and settle, 24/7. Large financial institutions have ramped up their tokenisation efforts over the past year as President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a more supportive stance toward digital assets, which has encouraged banks, asset managers and other financial firms to step up their blockchain initiatives. The market value of tokenised assets has surged to roughly US$37 billion, according to data provider rwa.xyz.
BlackRock, for one, has seen interest from a range of potential clients, including retail distributors who offer digital wallets, corporate treasurers beginning to use tokenised forms of cash, and capital markets participants looking for more efficient forms of collateral, Beccy Milchem, global head of cash distribution and head of the international cash management business, said in an interview.
“It’s still early days, but there are clients that are looking at this now,” Milchem said. “It will continue to evolve over the next few years as more people talk about it and talk about what they are using it for.”
Last month, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, alongside 40 financial firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and BlackRock, participated in a series of transactions involving tokenised securities.
Money market funds have emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas of tokenisation. The funds invest in short-term, low-risk securities such as Treasury bills and commercial paper and, unlike stablecoins — which are cryptocurrencies pegged to assets such as the US dollar — generate a yield for investors while seeking to maintain a stable value. That has led some firms to position tokenised money market funds as a complementary or alternative way to hold cash equivalents on blockchain networks.
The latest batch of BlackRock money market funds will be tokenised using JPMorgan’s Kinexys blockchain-based platform, the companies said. The bank will also continue to act as a transfer agent for the funds.
“We see it as a real opportunity to modernise market infrastructure and the ability to do peer-to-peer transfers appealed to some corporates as they look at how they do intra-company payments,” Hannah Winter, head of digital cash at BlackRock, said in an interview.
BlackRock was an early entrant into the tokenised funds build-out with its BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known as BUIDL, which has swelled to about US$2.7 billion since debuting in 2024, according to rwa.xyz. Chief executive officer Larry Fink has been one of tokenisation’s most vocal advocates on Wall Street.
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