In March 2024, BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager with over $10 trillion in AUM — launched BUIDL, a tokenized US Treasury fund on Ethereum. The fund allowed qualified investors to buy shares represented as ERC-20 tokens, each backed by short-term US government securities. BUIDL grew to over $500 million in assets within months, making it the largest tokenized treasury product in crypto.
The significance was seismic. For years, crypto advocates had argued that traditional financial assets would eventually move onchain. Skeptics dismissed this as fantasy — why would Wall Street need blockchains? BlackRock’s entry answered the question definitively: because tokenization makes assets more composable, more liquid, and available 24/7. A BUIDL token could serve as collateral in DeFi, settle instantly between counterparties, and trade without the T+1 settlement delay of traditional securities.
BUIDL was built in partnership with Securitize, a digital securities platform that handled the compliance and issuance infrastructure. The fund was available only to accredited investors, but its mere existence on a public blockchain meant that DeFi protocols could integrate it as collateral. MakerDAO approved BUIDL as backing for DAI. Other protocols followed. The line between TradFi and DeFi started blurring in ways that felt permanent.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who had been dismissive of crypto as recently as 2017, became one of its most vocal institutional supporters. His public statements about tokenization being “the next generation for markets” carried weight that no crypto-native voice could match. When the biggest player in traditional finance says the future is onchain, the conversation shifts from “if” to “when” — and BUIDL was the proof that “when” meant now.
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