BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, has created a new tokenized asset fund, according to a March 19 SEC filing.
The initiative — dubbed the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund — is registered in the British Virgin Islands and developed in partnership with San Francisco-based Securitize, a company focused on asset tokenization.
The technical details of the fund and which asset classes it aims to tokenize were not disclosed in the filing and remain unclear. On-chain data shows the fund has been seeded with an initial capital of $100 million USDC on the Ethereum blockchain.
The companies have yet to make a public announcement and did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.
RWAs
The establishment of the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund is reflective of the increasing interest in the tokenization of real-world assets. This emerging sector aims to combine the capabilities of digital assets with traditional finance to streamline the settlement process and enhance transactional efficiency via blockchain technology.
The market responded positively to the announcement of the fund, with a notable increase in the value of ONDO, the native token of Ondo Finance, a platform that facilitates the tokenization of real-world assets.
The token was trading at $0.5 as of press time, up 12% over the past 24 hours despite the wider market crash, according to CryptoSlate data.
With this new venture, BlackRock has positioned itself at the forefront of integrating digital assets with traditional financial services, potentially setting a trend for more institutional investments in blockchain technology.
BlackRock’s crypto journey
The Digital Liquidity Fund is the latest step in BlackRock’s broader journey in the digital assets industry, following the introduction of its spot Bitcoin ETF — IBIT — in January. The ETF has seen record-setting performance since its launch and rapidly attracted over $15 billion in assets under management.
The firm also has an Ethereum ETF application in the pipeline and is considered to be bullish on both crypto and the underlying blockchain technology that allows tokenization.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently highlighted the strategic importance of BTC and ETH ETFs as precursors to wider adoption of tokenization in the financial industry. He said these products would open the door to a significant shift towards incorporating digital assets into conventional financial practices.