BlackRock BUIDL

What it is

BUIDL is the ticker of the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, the first tokenised fund that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, issued on a public blockchain. It launched on Ethereum on 20 March 2024. The fund does something deliberately unexciting: it holds cash, US Treasury bills and repurchase agreements, the same assets a conventional money market fund holds. The token is the interesting part, because it turns a share in that fund into something that settles between wallets in near real time, at any hour of any day. The name, a long-running crypto pun on “build”, signalled that BlackRock knew exactly which audience it was addressing.

How it works

Each BUIDL token targets a steady value of one dollar, representing one share in the fund. Yield accrues daily as dividends and is paid monthly in the form of new tokens, so holders watch their balance grow rather than the price. Securitize, a regulated digital asset securities firm, tokenises the shares, runs the onboarding and keeps the register. This is not an open crypto asset: only qualified investors who pass Securitize’s checks can hold it, and tokens move only between pre-approved wallets. From its Ethereum start the fund expanded to further chains, including Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon and Solana, so institutions can hold their cash leg on whichever network they operate.

The story so far

BUIDL’s significance was never its mechanics, which Franklin Templeton and others had already trialled, but its issuer. When the largest asset manager on earth put a fund on a public blockchain, the debate about whether tokenisation was a fad largely ended. The fund passed $1 billion in assets by March 2025, within a year of launch, and derivatives venues began accepting it as collateral, letting trading firms post an asset that earns Treasury yield instead of idle cash. Its rivalry with Circle’s USYC and Ondo’s USDY has become the defining contest of the tokenised Treasury category.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, BUIDL sits around 35th in CoinGecko’s market listings at roughly $2.6 billion, just behind Circle’s USYC at about $3.0 billion. Because the token holds at a dollar, that figure tracks assets in the fund rather than a fluctuating price. Worth watching from here: whether BUIDL regains the lead in the tokenised Treasury race, how quickly exchanges and clearing houses accept fund tokens as collateral, and whether BlackRock extends the model to other asset classes, which it has publicly framed as a long-term direction. Our crypto explainers hub covers tokenisation across the crypto section.